It is in those portions of the _Herzensergiessungen_ in which Tieck collaborated, that the Roman Catholic tendency appears undisguisedly. It was Tieck who made the painter Antonio worship, not art alone, but also "the Blessed Virgin and the Holy Apostles"; and Tieck's is the dictum, that true love of art must be a "religious love or a beloved religion." But most remarkable of all as a biographical document is a letter, which, though repudiated by Tieck, was certainly written by him, the letter in which a young man, a disciple of Albert Dürer, who has come to Rome to study art, describes his conversion to Catholicism. It takes place in St. Peter's. "The sonorous Latin chants, which, rising and falling, penetrated the swelling waves of music like ships making their way through the waves of the sea, raised my soul higher and ever higher. When the music had pervaded my entire being and was flowing through all my veins, I roused myself from inward contemplation and looked around me, and the whole temple seemed to me to be alive, so intoxicated was I with the music. At this moment it ceased; a priest advanced to the high-altar, and with impressive gesture lifted high the Host in view of the assembled multitude. All sank upon their knees, and trumpets and I know not what mighty instruments crashed and boomed the spirit of adoration into my very soul. Then all at once it seemed to me as though that whole kneeling multitude were praying for the salvation of my soul, and I mingled my prayer with theirs." This passage is of peculiar importance because it contains a conclusive proof (one overlooked by that most thorough of observers and critics, Hettner) that the tendency to Catholicism had its root in the very first principle of the Romantic movement. Both Hettner and Julian Schmidt attach too much importance to the fact that Schlegel, as an old man, in his well-known letter to a French lady, ascribes this Catholic tendency simply to a _prédilection d'artiste_. For the reason, the origin, of the artistic predilection is to be found in the original revulsion from the rational. But the tendency in the direction of Catholicism was not the only one of Wackenroder's tendencies which was immediately seized upon and exaggerated by Tieck and his school. In the _Fantasien über die Kunst_ Wackenroder praises music as the art of arts, the art which above all others is capable of condensing and preserving the emotions of the human heart, of teaching us "to feel feeling." What else, what more, did the Romanticists feel? This exactly suited Tieck. Wackenroder proclaims the superiority of music over poetry, and affirms that the language of music is the richer of the two. To whom could this appeal as much as to the man whose poems are rather an expression of the moods in which poetry is written than poetry itself, rather moods of art than works of art?