The Wars of Liberty of 1813, which had caused a gust of joyous enthusiasm to penetrate even into the peaceful seclusion of the Nazarenes, were not, like the wars of 1870, the outcome of careful calculation, but the result of a sudden burst of ardour, and the disillusion had now followed upon the enthusiasm. In 1810, with the French bayonets gleaming outside the windows, and the French kettledrums drowning the sound of his voice, Fichte delivered at the Berlin University his famous speeches which sounded the réveillé for Germany. At the same time Kleist wrote his _Hermannschlacht_: Napoleon was to be treated as Hermann had treated Varus. "_Was blasen die Trompeten, Husaren heraus_," pealed through the air; the song of "_Got, der Eisen wachsen liess_" rose heavenwards in brazen accords. And not long after, the same lions who had beaten the Corsican at Leipzig, and had with Arndt conceived the idea of a great, united fatherland, had once more become the same easy-going people, drinking their beer and smoking their pipes in their little duodecimo principalities as of old. Those dreary times, which saw no prospect of relief in their own days, must needs nourish a devotion to the past. That haughty antiquity, which had been possessed of the ideal to which the present had not been able to attain, became the object of a fanatical adoration. Men lost themselves in the old storehouses of faded German reminiscences, and fled for inspiration to the times of a consolidated German Empire. This return to the ruins of the past was a protest against the grey, colourless present. The patriotic frenzy of the poets of freedom changed into enthusiasm for the vanished glories of mediæval Germany. They remembered with longing and yearning the days when the robber-knights ruled town and country from their strongholds. Schenkendorff sang hymns inspired by the old cathedrals, rummaged with holy horror among the skeletons of knights and heroes in the chapel, and wrote a poem in memory of the thousandth anniversary of the death of Charlemagne; Arndt, the bard of the wars of freedom, violently attacked the "industrialism" of the time, declaiming against steam and machinery; Zacharias Werner composed his poem, "_Das Feldgeschrei sei: alte Zeit wird neu_."