The traveller who visits a mine is let down into a subterranean shaft in company with a man who carries a lamp, by the uncertain light of which they explore the hidden depths. It is on such an expedition that I now invite my readers to accompany me. The shaft to which we are about to descend is that of the German "soul," a mine as deep, as dark, as strange, as rich in precious metal and in worthless refuse as any other. We shall note the imprint received by this soul in the days of Romanticism, for this purpose dwelling at length on the Romanticist who above all others is the poet of the soul--Novalis. No word in any other language is the exact equivalent of the German word "Gemüth," here translated "soul." "Gemüth" is something peculiarly German. It is the inward flame, the inward crucible. In the famous words of the "Wanderer's Sturmlied":-- "Innre Wärme, Seelenwärme, Mittelpunkt! Glüh entgegen Phöb-Apollon, Kalt wird sonst Sein Fürstenblick Ueber dich vorübergleiten," Goethe has described soul, and its significance in the poet's life. With those who have soul, everything tends inwards; soul is the centripetal force of the spiritual life. To the man who sets soul above all else in human life, fervour becomes a patent of nobility. In their conception of soul, as in everything else, the Romanticists rush to extremes. They magnify all that is mysterious, dark, and unexplained in the soul, at the expense of what is clear and beautiful. Goethe is to them the greatest of all poets, not because of his plastic power, but because of the obscurity, the dæmonic mystery, surrounding such characters as the Harper and Mignon, and because of the pregnant intensity of his smaller poems. Lessing and Schiller, on the other hand, are not deemed poets at all, and are sneered at and disparagingly criticised because of the outward direction taken by their keen, energetic thought. For enthusiasm, strength of character, and all such qualities are not soul. Soul remains at home when enthusiasm draws the sword and goes forth to war. To the Romanticists the greatest poet is he who has most soul. The change which takes place in the case of the Romanticists is the turning of Goethe's "Seelenwärme"--warmth of soul--into heat, a heat which rises to the boiling or melting point, and in its intensity consumes all established forms and ideas. The glory of the Romantic poet is the heat and passion of the emotion which burns within him. What Novalis does is done with the force of his whole being. Intense, reckless feeling is his motto.