And Tieck looked at and apprehended human nature exactly as he looked at and apprehended forest and mountain. In describing it, too, he drowns all definiteness and character in the flood of mystic pantheism. And this mystic pantheism in his plays paves the way for the Christian mysticism distinguishing the Romantic drama. Arnim and Brentano are hardly to be taken into account as dramatists. The latter, in his mad comedy, _Ponce de Leon_, the dialogue of which is loaded with wearisome play upon words, is the would-be disciple of Shakespeare, who has only succeeded in imitating the affectations of the master's youthful style. In his great Romantic drama, _Die Gründung Prags_ ("The Founding of Prague"), he gives us sorcery and miracles, visions and prophecies, magic rings and curses, instead of real human beings and real action; the course of events is indicated by strange forebodings and unerring second-sight. There is some resemblance between the manner in which Brentano has dramatised Slavonic legend in this play, and the Polish Romanticist Slowacki's treatment (in _Lilla Weneda_, for instance) of similar themes. Both, out of crude myths and traditions, have produced pictures of Slavonic heathendom which display a certain gift of intuition. The fact is that the Romantic authors of all lands had a keener sense for religious mysticism than for dramatic truth and effect. This play of Brentano's is actually declared to have influenced the mythological theories of his contemporaries, the brothers Grimm. Arnim's _Halle und Jerusalem_, the "tragedy in two comedies," as he himself styled it, in which the legend of the Wandering Jew is interwoven with the story of Cardenio and Celinde, is one of the most intolerable productions of German Romanticism. It is a reading-drama of four hundred large octavo pages, which begins as a wild student's comedy in Halle, and develops into a pilgrim-mystery in Jerusalem. It turns upon the medieval idea of the Holy Sepulchre being the centre of the world; and it ends with an apparition of three crosses of fire above the graves of the three principal characters. In one of the scenes Celinde attempts in the dead of night to cut the heart out of her dead lover's breast, that with its assistance she may perform certain magic rites which will ensure her possession of the heart of her living lover. The dead man, the blood pouring from his breast, rises out of his coffin, and complains of her treatment in such verse as:-- "Geliebte, du durchbohrst mein Herz, Das ist bittrer als der Hölle Schmerz."[3] Immediately after this, the sexton unmasks himself, reveals himself as the devil, and carries off Celinde's wicked mother to be his bride. In another scene Celinde is supposed to be about to give birth to a child in a mountain cavern. A stork appears on the stage carrying a child in its beak, and flies into the cavern. Then come a whole flight of storks, which direct their course southwards, singing:--