[308] This is the reading furnished by the fragments in the British Museum for an unintelligible passage in the Prisse. [309] "Them" is difficult to assign to any antecedent definitely; perhaps "without their advice how to behave and employ the wealth" is meant. [310] Or "those who are listened to," "instructors." [311] This was the ideal length of life in Egypt. The figure must not be taken too literally. [312] See note to Section 41, previous page. [313] That is, for the government. [314] _Lit._, doorkeepers--_i. e._, of the official cabin. JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF (1788-1857) The poetry of the Romantic School is the poetry of longing. It is filled with a spirit of passionate yearning that gives to it its pathos, and makes each poem seem the expression of an undefined but ardent wish. The poet's soul is reaching out for that which no longer is, but which has been and may be again. Novalis has symbolized this yearning in the quest for the mysterious "blue flower." Men longed for the glories of the past, and among the knights and minstrels of mediaeval court and castle they sought for that blue flower whose odor is love. In the bleak unfriendliness of the foggy Northern clime, the sunny expansive beauty of the South, where the magnificence of ancient ages still shimmered through a mellow haze, drew all sensitive hearts to Italy. Goethe felt the strong attraction, and fled without leave-taking across the Alps, to recover his genius under Italian skies. He gave to this deep and universal longing for Italy its classic incarnation in the pathetic figure of Mignon. In the very year in which Goethe returned from Rome, Joseph von Eichendorff was born. He was the last and most ardent of the Romanticists, and all the restless longing of those times found in him its typical interpreter.