The beautiful is thus, according to these later thinkers, the revelation of God to the mind through the senses; it is the appearance of the idea. In the beautiful spirit reveals itself to spirit through matter and the senses; thus the entire man feels himself raised and satisfied by it. By the unity of the beautiful with us we experience with delight that thought and the material world are present for our individuality, that they utter tones and shine forth in it, that both penetrate each other and blend in it and thus become one with it. We feel one with them and one in them. This later view was to a great extent expressed by Schiller in his “Æsthetical Letters.” But art and æsthetics, in the sense in which these terms are used and understood by German philosophical writers, such as Schiller, embrace a wider field than the line arts. Lessing, in his “Laocoon,” had already shown the point of contrast between painting and poetry; and æsthetics, being defined as the science of the beautiful, must of necessity embrace poetry. Accordingly Schiller’s essays on tragic art, pathos, and sentimental poetry, contained in this volume, are justly classed under his æsthetical writings. This being so, it is important to estimate briefly the transitions of German poetry before Schiller, and the position that he occupied in its historic development. The first classical period of German poetry and literature was contained between A.D. 1190 and 1300. It exhibits the intimate blending of the German and Christian elements, and their full development in splendid productions, for this was the period of the German national epos, the “Nibelungenlied,” and of the “Minnegesang.” This was a period which has nothing to compare with it in point of art and poetry, save perhaps, and that imperfectly, the heroic and post-Homeric age of early Greece. The poetical efforts of that early age may be grouped under—(1) national epos: the “Nibelungenlied;” (2) art epos: the “Rolandslied,” “Percival,” etc.; (3) the introduction of antique legends: Veldeck’s “Æneide,” and Konrad’s “War of Troy;” (4) Christian legends: “Barlaam,” “Sylvester,” “Pilatus,” &c.; (5) poetical narratives: “Crescentia,” “Graf Rudolf,” etc.; (6) animal legends; “Reinecke Vos;” (7) didactic poems: “Der Renner;” (8) the Minne-poetry, and prose.