First Winckelmann, then Wackenroder. In the very personalities of these two the whole opposition between Classicism and the Nazarenes is reflected. A student barely twenty years old, a mild, modest, contemplative soul, who had attached himself from early youth with womanly devotion to his more energetic friend Tieck, and written letters to him that read like a young girl's effusions to her sweetheart, he entered the Erlanger University with his friend at the Easter of 1793. They saw Nuremberg. More than once they made pilgrimages to the old fashioned town, the treasury of German art; and the spirit of the past powerfully inspired them. Whilst for Lessing and Winckelmann "Gothic" art only meant barbarian art, the wonders of Nuremberg were now observed with fresh eyes. In a sort of intoxication of art the friends wandered through churches, stood by the graves of Albrecht Dürer and Peter Vischer, and a vanished world rose before them. The spires and turrets behind falling walls and ramparts, the old, stately, patrician houses, which jutted out their oriel windows, as it were with curiosity, into the crooked streets, were peopled to their imagination with picturesque figures in bonnet and hose from that great time when Nuremberg was "the living, swarming school of native art," when "an exuberant, artistic spirit" governed within its walls, when Master Hans Sachs and Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer and Albrecht Dürer and Willibald Pirkheymer were alive. Shortly after that they came to Dresden, and devoted themselves in the gallery there to an enthusiastic cult of the Madonna. The _Herzensergiessungen eines Kunstliebenden Klosterbruders_, which appeared a year before Wackenroder's death in his twenty-sixth year, was the result of these wanderings and studies. In this tender production of a visionary youth the spirit of Romantic art found expression.