The way in which the people raised themselves from this abyss is peculiar to the Germans. Marvellous as was the destruction, so also was the revival. More than one nation has been overpowered by outward enemies or cast down under political oppression, each of which has had to undergo special trials which have given them from time to time a hopeless aspect, but through the whole course of history a renovation has been effected, so that the strengthening of the State has gone hand-in-hand with intellectual progress. When the Greeks during the Persian war felt their own political worth, their science and art blossomed almost simultaneously; when Augustus had given a new support and constitution to the declining Roman republic, there began forthwith a new Imperial culture in enjoyment-seeking Rome: the intellectual life, from Horace and Virgil to Tacitus, followed the destiny of the State; the increased expansive power of the Empire ever gave a wider stretch and stronger independence to individual minds. And again in England,--when the war of the Red and White Roses was ended, when the people peacefully danced round the maypole, and a brilliant court life enforced courtly manners upon the wild Barons, when daring merchants and adventurers waylaid the Spanish galleons, and conveyed the spices of India up the Thames,--then the popular energies found expression in the greatest poetic soul of modern nations. Even in France the splendid despotism of Louis XIV., after the wars of the Huguenots and the Fronde, gave suddenly to the tranquillised country a brilliant courtly bloom of art and literature. It was quite otherwise in Germany. Whilst everywhere else the State might be compared to the body whose abundant energy calls forth the creative development of the nation, in Germany, since the Thirty Years' War, owing to the awakening popular energy, a new national civilisation has gradually arisen in a shattered, decaying government, under corrupting and humiliating political influences of every kind,--first dependent upon strangers; then independent and free; finally, a shining pattern for other people, producing blossoms of poetry, and blossoms of science of the greatest beauty, of the highest nobility, and the greatest inward freedom: it was developed by individuals who were deficient in just that discipline of the mind and character, which is only given to them when they are members of a great State. The German culture of the eighteenth century was indeed the wonderful creation of a soul with out a body.