This was Görres' stormy youthful period. By the year 1800 he was beginning to withdraw from active politics, a visit to Paris having cured him of his sympathy with Frenchmen. But he was still an ardent progressionist, dreading nothing so much as a return to the past, which would mean a crushing tyranny (harsher after long abeyance and partly justified by existing circumstances), the rehabilitation of the priesthood, and combined political and religious reaction. The oppression of foreign rule aroused his patriotic feeling. At the university of Heidelberg he entered upon his Romantic period. He lectured on the nature of poetry and philosophy, waxed enthusiastic over the Nibelungenlied, studied ancient German history, poetry, and legend. He met his old schoolfellow, Clemens Brentano, became intimate with Arnim, and came into contact with Tieck and the brothers Schlegel and Grimm. It was at Heidelberg that he published his _Kindermythen_ ("Child Myths"), _Die Deutschen Volksbücher_ ("The National Literature of Germany"), and his collection of old German Volkslieder and Meisterlieder. It was not only national feeling which the Romantic movement aroused in Görres; it induced an almost equally strong feeling of cosmopolitanism, under the influence of which he took up the study of Persian, a hitherto neglected language, and, almost unassisted, attained such proficiency in it that he was able to produce a tasteful prose translation of Firdusi's epic poetry. In 1818 he went to Berlin as spokesman of a deputation from the town of Coblentz. He boldly urged the king to fulfil the promise of a constitution given at the time of the War of Liberation, and his daring was rewarded with disgrace and several years of exile. Until 1824 Görres continued to be, to all intents and purposes, the Romantic German patriot. From that year until his death in 1848, he is the champion of the clerical reaction. In his _Deutschland und die Revolution_ (1820) the tendency to Catholicism is already distinct; in it he characterises the Reformation as "a second Fall." He became absorbed in the study of the history of the Middle Ages, and began to regard the Church as the only power capable of satisfactorily defending the liberty of the people from the encroachments of absolutism. Soon, under the influence of Brentano and Franz Baader, he became a believer in visions and bigotedly religious. Clemens Brentano was at this time, like Apollonius of Tyana in days of old, exercising a powerful influence upon a generation predisposed to theosophical extravagances; and Mme. de Krüdener was founding the Holy Alliance.