I have said that this poet was great specially in the elegiac style, and it is scarcely necessary to confirm this judgment by entering into particulars. Capable of exercising all kinds of action on the heart, and having graduated as master in all that relates to sentimental poetry, he can sometimes shake the soul by the most sublime pathos, at others cradle it with sweet and heavenly sensations. Yet his heart prefers to follow the direction of a lofty spiritual melancholy; and, however sublime be the tones of his harp and of his lyre, they are always the tender notes of his lute that resound with most truth and the deepest emotion. I take as witnesses all those whose nature is pure and sensuous: would they not be ready to give all the passages where Klopstock is strong, and bold; all those fictions, all the magnificent descriptions, all the models of eloquence which abound in the “Messiah,” all those dazzling comparisons in which our poet excels,—would they not exchange them for the pages breathing tenderness, the “Elegy to Ebert” for example, or that admirable poem entitled “Bardalus,” or again, the “Tombs Opened before the Hour,” the “Summer’s Night,” the “Lake of Zurich,” and many other pieces of this kind? In the same way the “Messiah” is dear to me as a treasure of elegiac feelings and of ideal paintings, though I am not much satisfied with it as the recital of an action and as an epic. I ought, perhaps, before quitting this department, to recall the merits in this style of Uz, Denis, Gessner—in the “Death of Abel”—Jacobi, Gerstenberg, Hölty, De Göckingk, and several others, who all knew how to touch by ideas, and whose poems belong to the sentimental kind in the sense in which we have agreed to understand the word. But my object is not here to write a history of German poetry; I only wished to clear up what I said further back by some examples from our literature. I wished to show that the ancient and the modern poets, the authors of simple poetry and of sentimental poetry, follow essentially different paths to arrive at the same end: that the former move by nature, individuality, a very vivid _sensuous_ element; while the latter do it by means of ideas and a high _spirituality_, exercising over our minds an equally powerful though less extensive influence.