The intellectual awakening which this King had failed to understand had wrought a mighty change in Germany. Lessing had been the first to break away from an enfeebling imitation of French _Sentimentlalism_. The genius of Goethe and Schiller awakened a new spirit in literature, that of _Romanticism_, and there commenced that intellectual convulsion known as _Sturm und Drang_, or storm and stress period. While Goethe and Schiller were supreme in the kingdom of letters, Herder and the Schlegels were great in history and criticism; Humboldt and Ritter in geographical science; Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and Kant in philosophy; Fouqué and Tieck in imagination, and Jean Paul Richter in the mysterious ether of transcendental thought. When Karl August called Goethe to his Court in Saxe-Weimar, among that group of other illustrious authors, and gave to Weimar the name of the "German Athens," it was a Golden Age for Germany. It is interesting to recall that it was Luther who gave the first impulse to this movement, by revealing to the people the riches of their own tongue. In his translation of the Bible, and in his hymns, so grandly simple, he created the modern German language. The influence of Luther was felt in another art, too. The enthusiasm awakened by the singing of his hymns revolutionized the form of ecclesiastical music. In this Golden Age in Germany music, too, had become a great art, with such immortal names as Mozart, Gluck, Haydn, and Beethoven; and the period of great orchestration also had commenced.[1] Although Frederick's tastes led him so strongly to letters and to music, these two arts had attained this rich development in Germany without any assistance from him. When he died in 1786 the monument he left was a Kingdom of Prussia; equal in rank with any of the Great Powers of Europe, enlarged in territory, rich in population, with a great army and an overflowing treasury. As Frederick the Great had no son, this splendid inheritance passed to his nephew Frederick William II. With the new ascendency of Prussia in the German Empire, a process which had long been going on was accelerated. That empire had become a fiction, a form from which the substance had long ago departed; almost its only remaining relic being an Imperial Diet, where thirty solemn old men supposed they were holding the venerated structure together by weaving about it, and repairing, the thin, worn threads of tradition.