This revival of romanticism opened up a wide field to science and poetry. The apotheosis of the old imperial times was made manifest amid fairy-like glamour. Poetry grasped the pilgrim's staff, or rode with beauteous dames on milk-white palfreys through forest and glade. Enchanted genii, elves, fairies, and goblins were encountered on the road. Nowhere is there so sweet a scent of blossoms, so innocent a sound of children's merriment, as in Tieck's delightful and dainty fairy-tales, or in the works of Clemens Brentano, those precious stories of Father Rhine, of the water-nymphs and the crystal castles at the bottom of the green current, pictures full of charming wilfulness, dreamily winsome, like summer evenings on the Rhine. Uhland sang, as once had sung the knightly poets with the golden harps-- "Von Gottesminne, von kühner Helden Muth, Von lindem liebesinne, von süsser Maiengluth." To this day we seem to peep between the weather-beaten castles, standing on their grey rocks along the Rhine Valley, into the realm of romance as into an enigma propounded by mountain and dale. Rhine and romance! No spot in Germany was better fitted to become the cradle of a romantic art than Düsseldorf, the peaceful town on the legend-haunted banks of the green river. In the fifteenth century, in addition to the school of Florence, where flowed a rich current of political and human life, where great buildings, monuments, and frescoes kept architects and sculptors and painters uniformly busied, there existed in the remote Umbrian valleys, in the land of miracles and visions, that school of painting in oils which saw its only eternal ideal in the deep eyes and soft aspect of the Madonna, and made the visionary aspirations of the soul, emotions, and sentiment the exclusive subject of their pictures. In the same manner, in the nineteenth century, we find in contrast with the Munich school, with its numerous architectural products, its massive statuary, and the epic-dramatic fresco painting of Cornelius--"wedding the German to the Greek, and Faust to Helen"--that lyrico-sentimental Düsseldorf school of painting which embraced Madonnas and prophets, knights and robbers, gipsies and monks, water-nymphs and nuns with the same languishing tenderness. In matter and technique it completes the art of Cornelius and the Nazarenes; that of the Munich master by its encouragement of oil-painting; that of the Nazarenes by the stress which it lays upon the more worldly side of mediæval life, upon chivalry, and in a less degree upon that other pillar of mediævalism the Church. The Nazarenes are archæological and ascetic; the Düsseldorf school is insipid in a modern way, feeble, colourless, and sentimental.