It is at first sight one of the most amazing facts in literary history that Germany should have been so late in arriving at a stage of creative genius which was reached five centuries earlier in Italy, a hundred and fifty years earlier in France, and nearly two hundred years earlier in England; for by so much time does the flourishing of Dante, of Corneille, and of Shakespeare, respectively precede the flourishing of Goethe. When we recognize what a capacity the German mind possesses for deep and sustained reflection, for tender sentiment, for rhythmic expression, we are struck with wonder that, before the days of Lessing in the latter half of the eighteenth century, German literature appears like a huge sand-waste, with here and there a poor oasis yielding for the most part but stony fruits and almost destitute of verdant beauty, except—and the exception is considerable—those simple and earnest _Volkslieder_ in which the Teutonic feeling finds such touching outlet. The _Lay of the Nibelungen_ is properly an antique. The Minnesänger are to us little more than a tradition. Of the Meistersänger perhaps Hans Sachs is the only name which readily recalls itself. Luther we know full well, but, except for his hymn, _Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott_, he is remembered as a figure of theological controversy and a translator of the Bible rather than as a man of letters in the proper sense. We are familiar with the almost omniscient Leibnitz in the realms of science and philosophy; but it is not till towards the end of the eighteenth century, just before our own Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley, that we meet with a fully matured and artistic literature, graced with numerous rememberable names—with Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and, in a minor rank, Klopstock, Wieland, Bürger, Jean Paul Richter.