The poets whom Schubert set to music (over 100 in all) represent several stages of a tremendous upheaval in German life and literature--roughly, the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. For convenience we may divide them into three classes--the ‘Storm and Stress’ poets, the Romantic poets, and the ‘young-German’ poets. The _Sturm und Drang_, or ‘Storm and Stress,’ tendency was the German equivalent of the pre-revolutionary upheaval among the educated classes of France. Its ideal was that of the highest perfection for the individual--personal rights rather than social duties. The so-called Romantic movement (in the narrower meaning of the term) was at its height during Napoleon’s period of power. It was double. On the one hand, it was _Sturm und Drang_, individualism carried to its extreme, with a high premium set on the imagination and a morbid interest in what we should to-day call ‘psychology.’ On the other hand, it was the growth of the social and national spirit which aroused a sense of nationalism in Germany under Napoleon’s tyranny and enabled the Germans gloriously to shake off the French yoke. The third period, in which Schubert did most of his actual work, was that of disillusionment, when the liberal dreams of the German enthusiasts had been met by the stupid reactionism of the German princes and the Congress of Vienna. The German uprising against Napoleon had been synonymous in the minds of most with a movement toward liberal institutions and political freedom. Under the royal houses of Germany the people were forced back, at the point of the sword, to a state little better than mediævalism. The poets of the ‘young-German’ movement saw that the dreams of the previous generation had been made a fiasco and turned to cynicism, with just a shadow of a bitter dream of vengeance stored up for the future.