His birth was in a middle-class family of Berlin. A full university training at Halle, Göttingen and Erlangen was accorded him, during which he cannot be said to have distinguished himself by any triumph in the field of formal studies, but in the course of which he assimilated at first hand the chief modern languages of culture, without any professional guidance. At an early stage in his growth he discovered and fed full upon Shakespeare. As a university student he also fell in love with the homely lore of German folk-poetry. In 1794 he came back to Berlin, and turned to rather banal hack-writing for the publisher Nicolai, chief of all exponents of rationalism. Significant was his early rehabilitation of popular folk-tales and chapbooks, as in _The Wonderful Love-Story of Beautiful Magelone and Count Peter of Provence_ (1797). The stuff was that of one of the prose chivalry-stories of the middle ages, full of marvels, seeking the remote among strange hazards by land and sea. The tone of Tieck's narrative is childlike and naïve, with rainbow-glows of the bliss of romantic love, glimpses of the poetry and symbolism of Catholic tradition, and a somewhat sugary admixture of the spirit of the _Minnelied_, with plenty of refined and delicate sensuousness. With the postulate that song is the true language of life, the story is sprinkled with lyrics at every turn. The whole adventure is into the realm of dreams and vague sensations. Tieck must have been liberally baptized with Spree-water, for the instantaneous, corrosive Berlin wit was a large part of his endowment. His cool irony associated him more closely to the Schlegels than to Novalis, with his life-and-death consecrations. His absurd play-within-a-play, _Puss in Boots_ (1797), is delicious in its bizarre ragout of satirical extravaganzas, where the naïve and the ironic lie side by side, and where the pompous seriousness of certain complacent standards is neatly excoriated. Such publications as the two mentioned were hailed with rejoicing by the Schlegels, who at once adopted Tieck as a natural ally. Even more after their own hearts was the long novel, _Franz Sternbald's Wanderings_ (1798), a vibrant confession, somewhat influenced by _Wilhelm Meister_, of the Religion of Art (or the Art of Religion): "Devout worship is the highest and purest joy in Art, a joy of which our natures are capable only in their purest and most exalted hours." [Illustration: #A WANDERER LOOKS INTO A LANDSCAPE# MORITZ VON SCHWIND]