"Die Myrthe _still_ und _hoch_ der Lorbeer steht"; the Romantic poets express themselves in superlatives. The Italy of literature in general may perhaps be best and most briefly defined as the Italy of Leopold Robert (though even this definition is too exact), a country which never existed on any map but that of the Romanticists. The real Italy, with its bright colours and its cheerful life, is not to be found. Colour is replaced by ideal forms; movement is petrified, that it may not disturb an interplay of beautiful waving lines. To the Romanticists Italy became what Dulcinea was to Don Quixote, an ideal of which they knew almost nothing beyond what was conveyed by a few general, vapid descriptive phrases. When a definite, real country is advanced to be the object of men's longings, the home of beauty, it gradually loses, in their depictions of it, all its real, living beauty. But it never was the real, living beauty of Italy which the later Romanticists loved; it was Italy as a ruin; it was Catholicism as a mummy; it was the dwarfed and stunted spirit of the people (Volksgeist), which, hermetically sealed up by a partly ignorant, partly ambitious and designing priesthood, has remained unenlightened and naïve. What they admired here, as elsewhere, was the feeble, lifeless poetry of a day that was dead and gone. But this cult of Italy and of the pious, or seemingly pious Italian painters, is only the stepping-stone by which the "Friar" passes to the worship of his own particular idol, Albert Dürer. With his enthusiasm for this apostle of German art is combined enthusiasm for ancient Nuremberg. When Tieck and Wackenroder travelled together through Germany in 1793, Nuremberg was their chief place of pilgrimage. The oftener they saw the town, the more affection, nay devotion, did they conceive for it. "The art life of Germany revealed itself to them there in all its fulness. That of which they had hitherto only divined the possibility, had here long been a living reality. How rich in monuments of all the arts was this town, with its churches of St. Sebald and St. Lorenz, its works by Albert Dürer, Vischer, and Krafft! Artistic feeling and ardent industry had here elevated handicraft to the rank of art. Every house was a monument of the past; every well, every bench, bore witness to the citizens of the quiet, simple, thoughtful life of their forefathers. No whitewash had as yet reduced the houses to uniformity. There they stood in all their stateliness, each with its carven imagery, borrowed from poem and legend. Ottnit, Siegenot, Dietrich, and other old heroes, were to be seen above the doors, guarding and protecting the home. Over the old imperial city, with its marvels and its oddities, hung a fragrance which in other places had long ago been blown away by the winds of political change and enlightenment."[1] Nuremberg is, in very deed, a splendid old town, but it is easy to understand the special attraction there must have