feeling a kind of holy awe, which prevented me from at once yielding to my inclination. At last, one day, when my master was absent, I overcame my fear and sprang upon the table. What joy to sit in the midst of the papers and books and rummage about amongst them!" Then the cat dexterously opens a large book with its paws and endeavours to comprehend the printed signs. At the very moment, however, when it seems to feel a wonderful spirit taking possession of it, it is surprised by its master who, with the cry: "Confounded animal!" rushes at it with uplifted stick. But he immediately starts back, exclaiming: "Cat! cat! you are reading! Nay, that I may not and will not forbid. What a marvellous desire for knowledge you have been born with!" Such a scene cannot strike us as unnatural in a purely fanciful tale, when we have learned what could happen in real life. We seem to see the rainbow of fantastic imagination stretching its arch over the whole Romantic movement, from its first mild, though earnest, herald to its last weird, mannered exponent, from Wackenroder to Hoffmann. When, in the Life of Tieck, we find innumerable records of similar hallucinations, we begin to suspect that there is nothing, however fantastic, to be found in the Romanticists' writings which their fevered vision did not persuade them that they saw in real life. It is exceedingly interesting to observe, not only the influence which Wackenroder's moods and emotions exercise upon Tieck, but also the part which the latter, thus influenced, takes in Wackenroder's work. The first thing which strikes one is, that Tieck, hitherto able only during the emancipating moments of production to rouse himself out of dark, William Lovell-like moods and give his rich talent free play, learns from Wackenroder to believe in imagination and art as mighty powers in human life, thereby arriving at the only firm basis for a philosophy of life to which he ever attained. The second is, that he, the less independent spirit of the two, following in Wackenroder's footsteps, accentuates all his tendencies, carrying them to wildly fantastic, yet natural conclusions.