Utterly un-Greek, wholly Romantic, is the love which Hyperion cherishes for his Diotima. It is the same deep and tragic feeling which bound Hölderlin, the poor tutor, to the mother of his pupils, Frau Susette Gontard, and determined his fate. No Greek ever spoke of the woman he loved with the religious adoration which Hölderlin expresses for his "fair Grecian." "Dear friend, there is a being upon this earth in whom my spirit can and will repose for untold centuries, and then still feel how puerile, face to face with nature, all our thought and understanding is." And exactly the same Romantic, Petrarchian note is struck by Hyperion when he speaks of Diotima. Diotima is "the one thing desired by Hyperion's soul, the perfection which we imagine to exist beyond the stars." She is beauty itself, the incarnation of the ideal. Love is to him religion, and his religion is love of beauty. Beauty is the highest, the absolute ideal; it belongs, as a conception, to the world of reason, and as a symbol, to the world of imagination. From his æsthetic point of view, Hölderlin does not perceive that boundary line drawn by Kant between the domains of reason and imagination. His theory, a species of poetic--philosophic ecstasy, having points in common with both Schiller's Hellenism and Schelling's transcendental idealism, is Romantic before the days of Romanticism. Germinating Romanticism is also to be traced in the gleam of Christian feeling which tinges his half-modern pantheism. He had been originally destined for the Church, and had suffered much from the severe discipline of the monastery where he was educated. In spite, however, of the many evidences of a pious disposition which we find in his letters, he was a pagan in his poems. He disliked priests, and steadily withstood his family's desire that he should become one. In his _Empedokles_ we come upon the following significant reply of the hero to the priest Hermokrates:-- "Du weisst es ja, ich hab es dir bedeutet, Ich kenne dich und deine schlimme Zunft. Und lange Avar's ein Räthsel mir, wie euch In ihrem Runde duldet die Natur. Ach, als ich noch ein Knabe war, da mied Euch Allverderber schon mein frommes Herz, Das unbestechbar, innig liebend hing An Sonn' und Aether und den Boten allen Der grossen ferngeahndeten Natur; Denn wohl hab ich's gefühlt in meiner Furcht, Dass ihr des Herzens freie Götterliebe Bereden möchtet zu gemeinem Dienst, Und dass ich's treiben sollte so, wie ihr. Hinweg! ich kann vor mir den Mann nicht sehn, Der Göttliches wie ein Gewerbe treibt, Sein Angesicht ist falsch und kalt und todt, Wie seine Götter sind."[1]