As I follow the more important literary movements from country to country, studying their psychology, I attempt to condense the fluid material by showing how, from time to time, it crystallises into one or other definite and intelligible type. The attempt is attended with extraordinary difficulty in this particular period of German literature, from the fact that the chief characteristic of the period is an absence of distinctly typical forms. This literature is not plastic; it is musical. French Romanticism produces clearly defined figures; the ideal of German Romanticism is not a figure, but a melody, not definite form, but infinite aspiration. Is it obliged to name the object of its longing? It designates it by such terms as "ein geheimes Wort," "eine blaue Blume," "der Zauber der Waldeinsamkeit" (a mystic word--a blue flower--the magic of the lonely woods). These expressions are, however, definitions of moods, and each mood has a corresponding psychological condition, my task is to trace back each mood, emotion, or longing to the group of psychological conditions to which it belongs. This group in combination constitutes a soul; and such a soul, with strongly marked individuality, represents in literature the many who were unable to depict their own character, but who recognised it when thus placed before them. I may possibly succeed in proving that the type does not escape us because the author may have chosen to paint landscape after landscape in place of delineating characteristic personalities, or because he confounds literature with music to the extent of at last entitling his poems simply _Allegro_ or _Rondo_; but that, on the contrary, the distinctly peculiar qualities of these landscapes and the character of this word-music are symptomatic of a psychological condition which may be determined with considerable accuracy. In the general introduction to this work I have sketched the plan which I have proposed to myself. It is my intention to describe the first great literary movement of the century, the germinating and growing reaction, first elucidating its nature, then following it to its climax. Afterwards I shall show how this reaction was met by a breeze of liberalism blowing from the eighteenth century, which swells into a gale and sweeps away all opposition. Not that the liberal views of the nineteenth century are ever identical with those of the eighteenth, or that its literary forms or scientific ideas ever bear the eighteenth century stamp. Neither Voltaire, nor Rousseau, nor Diderot, neither Lessing nor Schiller, neither Hume nor Godwin, rise from the dead; but they are one and all avenged upon their enemies. Regarded as a whole, German Romanticism is reaction. Nevertheless, as an intellectual, poetico-philosophical reaction, it contains many germs of new development, unmistakable productions of that spirit of progress which, by remoulding the old, creates the new, and by altering boundaries gains territory.