Merkel is done for; he will never recover it. There will be a terrible uproar.... Schelling is attacking the _Allgemeine Litteraturzeitung_ with all his might. _These quarrels, however, are of no importance to you; but Buonaparte and the Russians most certainly are_." It is as though she strove to keep the larger interests alive in her daughter, feeling that they were dying in herself. Soon she marries Schelling, and conforms to all the established conventions of that great clerical stronghold, Bavaria. Many great men have vainly attempted to teach the women they loved to share their interests. To my mind no worse accusation can be brought against gifted men, no surer sign of their weakness adduced than this, that, far from raising the women who have given themselves to them and followed them, they have dragged them down, taken from them their highest interests and noblest sympathies, and given them small and mean ones in exchange. From such a charge the Romanticists cannot free themselves. They treated the great women given them by the gods as they did the great ideas which were their own heritage; they took from them the noble, liberal-minded social and political enthusiasm by which they were naturally characterised, and made them, first Romantic and literary, then remorseful, and finally Catholic. [1] Plitt: _Aus Schelling's Leben_, i. 282. "I can bear it no longer; I must live once more, must let my senses have free play--these senses of which I have well-nigh been robbed by the grand transcendental theories to which they have done their utmost to convert me. But I too will now confess how my heart leaps and the hot blood rushes through my veins; my word is as good as any man's; and of good cheer have I been, in fair weather and in foul, since I became persuaded that there is nothing real but matter. I care not for the invisible; I keep to the tangible, to what I can taste and smell, and feel, and satisfy all my senses with. I have no religion but this, that I love a well-shaped knee, a fair, plump bosom, a slender waist, flowers with the sweetest odours, full satisfaction of all desires, the granting of all sweet love can ask. If I am obliged to have a religion (though I can live most happily without it), then it must be the Catholic, such as it was in the olden days, when there was no scolding and quarrelling, when all were kneaded of one dough. They did not trouble about the far-off, did not look longingly up to heaven; they had a living image of God. The earth they held to be the centre of the universe, and the centre of the earth was Rome. There the great vicegerent sat enthroned, and wielded the sceptre of the world; and priests and laity lived together as they live in the land of Cocagne; and in the house of God itself high revelry was held." [2] Köpke: _Tieck's Leben_, i. 193. [3] Florentin, pp. 65, 80, 170, 195, 230, 310. [4] Haym, _Die romantische Schule_, 509, 525, 663, &c. [5] _Caroline_, i. 254, 259, 261.