But the mode of expressing the feelings of the heart was altered. When a century before, Felix Platter related the beginning of his love for his maiden, he expresses his feeling in these simple words: "I began to love her much;" Lucä, on the other hand, already expresses himself thus: "That the stream of chaste love filled his heart to overflowing." The bride of the Glauburger still decorously addressed her bridegroom in her letters as "Dearly beloved Junker;" but now in a tender epistle from a wife to her husband, she accosts him as "Most beautiful angel." In other European nations also, we find the same false refinement; with them also the finest feelings were overloaded with ornament. Through the foreign and classical poets this style had been brought into Germany, partly a bad kind of renaissance, which had originated in an unskilful imitation of the ancients. But nevertheless it satisfied a real need of the heart; men wished to raise themselves and those they loved, out of the common realities of life into a purer atmosphere: as angels, they placed them in the golden halo of the Christian heaven; as goddesses, in the ancient Olympus; as Chloe, in the sweet perfumed air of the Idylls. In the same childish effort to make themselves honourable, dignified, and great, they wore peruques, introduced ridiculous titles, believed in the philosopher's stone, and entered into secret societies; and whoever would write a history of the German mind might well call this a period of ardent aspirations. These aspirations were not altogether estimable, by turns they became vague, childish, fanatical, stupid, sentimental, and at last dissolute; but beneath might always be discovered the feeling that there was something wanting in German life. Was it a higher morality? Was it gaiety? Perhaps it was the grace of God? The beautiful or the frivolous? Or perhaps that was wanting to the people, which the princes had long possessed, political life. With the broken window-panes of the Thirty years' war, and the choice phrases of the young officers who banqueted in the tent of General Hatzfeld, this period of aspiration began; it reached its highest point in the fine minds which gathered round Goethe, and in the brothers who embraced in the east, and it ended perhaps with the war of freedom, or amidst the alarms of 1848.