In his _Letters on Lucinde_, Schleiermacher, the high-minded and honourable, brought all his intelligence to bear upon the task of finding something complete, something sensible, in the book. He read his personal opinions into it. But his position was a false one. He was trying, by means of the discussion of an unreal book, to settle a real question, trying to base a freer, higher moral code upon a work which, instead of doing what it professed to do, namely, proving the possibility of transforming life into poetry, simply retailed the fantastic performances of a few talented individuals, interspersing reflections on the poetry in a wild, extravagant reality. _Lucinde_ was hollow at the core. And this hollow, empty idealism is a feature common to all the many ramifications of Romanticism. Goethe's Prometheus cries to Zeus: "Didst thou imagine that I would loathe life, that I would flee into the wilderness, because all my dream-blossoms did not mature?" Thus speaks a Prometheus, thus a Goethe. But it was only natural that this emotional, inactive young generation should produce a group of authors who, just because "all their dream-blossoms did not mature," in desperate dissatisfaction with reality grasped at empty air and pursued shadows, which they obstinately persisted in trying to endow with corporeal existence, maintaining that art and poetry and their element and organ, imagination, are alone essential and living, but that all else (in other words, real life) is, as vulgar prose, meaningless, nay evil, in the eyes of genius.[1] And yet the earliest preachers of this new doctrine were far from being wild or defiant. The first countenance which meets our gaze is, on the contrary, peculiarly gentle, one of the purest and mildest in all modern literature--the pale, noble face of Wackenroder. The Romantic enthusiasm for art first found expression in a delicate little work from the pen of an ardent youth, whose life was shortened by the conflict between his burning desire to live for art, and the obligation laid upon him by his father to pursue a practical calling. He died, his powers entirely exhausted, in his twenty-fifth year. His life was like the mild, gentle breeze, which on a day in the early spring warms the air, and tempts forth the first flowers. His letters to Tieck, who was his intimate friend, and for whom he had an unbounded admiration, reveal an almost girlish affection for that more virile and notable man.