Theodor Mundt, born at Potsdam in 1808, was a man capable of enthusiastic, yet clear-sighted devotion to causes and to persons. He had Wienbarg's enthusiastic temperament (though not his bravery), with a much more highly gifted, many-sided mind. And yet there was no edge or pungency in his wit, no grace in his whimsicality, no method in his works, no conciseness in his style. His book on Charlotte Stieglitz is the only one of his works that has survived him, and it has done so thanks to its subject. He could be caustic and biting and unjust, as weak natures are apt to be, but even his most caustic tirades are not the expression of any warlike inclination; they are only penned in self-defence and self-assertion, are called forth by some misunderstanding on the part of an opponent, and are no more dangerous than the thrusts of an angry wether. It is surprising to the modern reader that a work like Mundt's _Madonna_ can ever have been considered a dangerous book. To understand how this could be, we must keep in mind that those in power at the time of its publication stood in terror of shadows. It is, however, a book which must not be overlooked by any one who is making a study of the period, for there is something typical in its expression of the thoughts and enthusiasms of the youth of the day. In its very formlessness, _Madonna_ is characteristic of Mundt, and of those whose literary taste was identical with his. It contains prose lyric effusions, descriptions of travel, personal confessions, world-revolutionising theories of the rehabilitation of the flesh by means of a hitherto unknown mystic creed--all this grouped round a central female figure and interwoven with her story. The book opens with a "post-horn symphony," well written in the old Romantic style, but not Romantic in tendency. It is a glorification of "movement," the shibboleth which Mundt invented and fell in love with. Movement is to him what progress and the struggle for freedom were to others--the watchword of the new era. He talks of the party of movement; the new literature is to him the literature of movement (_Bewegungslitteratur_); in a postscript to _Madonna_ he calls that book _ein Bewegungsbuch_. We perceive that the expression is perfectly neutral and innocent.