All the masters of the school agree on this point. First and foremost we have Novalis. His _Hymns to Night_, and indeed all his lyrics, are night and twilight poetry, in the dusk of which no distinct outlines are possible. His psychological aim was, as he himself says, to fathom the nameless, unconscious powers of the soul. Therefore his æsthetic theory is, that language ought to become musical, to become song again; and he also maintains that in a poetical work there need be no unity except that of spirit, that unity of idea or action is unnecessary. "One can imagine," he says, "tales without more coherence than the different stages of a dream, poems which are melodious and full of beautiful words, but destitute of meaning or connection; at most, comprehensible stanzas here and there, like fragments of perfectly unrelated things. This true poetry can of course only have a general allegorical significance and an indirect effect, like music." How entirely this harmonises with the theories of Friedrich Schlegel! Schlegel, whose nature was a series of moods, who had not strength of will to carry out any plan, whose own career resembles an arabesque beginning with a thyrsus and ending with a cross composed of a knife and fork, says: "The arabesque, the simple musical swaying of the line itself, is the oldest, the original form in which human imagination takes shape. Its contours are no more definite than those of the clouds in the evening sky." The saying is apt when applied, not to imagination in general, but to the imagination of the Romanticists. Tieck's lyrics resemble Goethe's as the clouds on the horizon resemble snow-clad mountains. Our attitude to the lyric poetry of the Romanticists resembles that of Polonius to the cloud: "Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel?--By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed.--Methinks it is like a weasel.--It is backed like a weasel.--Or like a whale?--Very like a whale." In Novalis, in the poems at any rate, we have still tangible, distinct artistic form, in Tieck's writings everything floats in a sort of mist or vapour of form supposed to correspond to the mysterious, expectant fervour of the theme. The work of art is stayed and fixed in its first, embryonic, vapour-ball stage. This elementary product of the imagination is designated primitive poetry. In order to reduce clearly defined poetic art once more to primeval poetry, all definite forms must be dissolved and kneaded together. Tieck preferred those works of the great poets which they wrote before their style was developed, or which they chose to leave tolerably formless (he confesses that not one of Shakespeare's plays produced such an impression on him as _Pericles_, only part of which is genuine), and he himself, following in the track of _Pericles_, produced such works as _Genoveva_ and _Octavian_, in which the epic, lyric, and dramatic styles are all minced up together.