[9] A respectable citizen! You an ordinary respectable citizen! Shame on you, my friend I Was this your aim in life? Is this the end of all your passionate song? Take back the offensive word, I pray; just imagine displaying such vulgar-mindedness! Mine is a nobler ambition: I am determined to be a Privy Councillor! [10] My advice to you is to drop the cards and look out for yourself, O minister! Remember that you have to do with four stallions, not four citizens! [11] You ask me why he lies sleepless? why in his rage he tears the lace from his pillow? A good conscience sleeps well everywhere, a bad conscience nowhere. He has sucked the blood of his country, gorged himself with its substance; during a whole long life he has stolen and lied and deceived. [12] If heart and style remain still true, I'll not object, whatever you do. My friend, I never will mistake you, E'en though a Councillor they make you. (BOWRING.) [13] They lie, they squabble, they hate one another with a deadly hatred; it is only want of courage that keeps them from robbing and murdering. They dare not do the things they long to do, and so they talk much about right and duty. Those that think keep their thoughts to themselves; most of them do not think. [14] We clung to each other-was it to pass the time, or was it in despair? she a lost, new-born woman, I a lost, new-born man. [15] _Briefwechsel zwischen Feuerbach und Christian Kapp_, 1876, p, 176. [16] _Wesen der Religion_, p. vii. XXVII REVOLUTIONARY POETRY The profoundest characteristic of that literature which in the Forties still continued to be known by the name of _Bewegungslitteratur_, is its utter want of connection with official Germany. It is the absence of any such connection that gives it its strength and its freshness. Official Germany is not to be taken here in the narrow sense of German officialdom; it means all that part of the people--German or any other--which in normal circumstances appears to be the whole people, and as such sets the stamp of nationality on all that is produced by that people, the same stamp which it has set on all that has emanated from it in the past. With what a later period has called _Bildungsphilisterei_ (cultured philistinism), the most eminent literary men of the period in question have no connection whatever. There is no corresponding group of personalities and writings in Scandinavian literature. Even the Radical poetry of the Scandinavian students became official in the course of a very few years. The most gifted of the German poets of the day are independent, or make themselves independent, of official Germany, and bear like men the consequences of the position they take up.