A witty Frenchman--a few years ago these words would have been a pleonasm--once dubbed me an unfrocked Romanticist. I have a weakness for all that is witty; and spiteful as was this appelation, it nevertheless delighted me highly. Notwithstanding the war of extermination that I had waged against Romanticism, I always remained a Romanticist at heart, and that in a higher degree than I myself realised. After I had delivered the most deadly blows against the taste for Romantic poetry in Germany, there stole over me an inexpressible yearning for the blue flower in the fairy-land of Romanticism, and I grasped the magic lyre and sang a song wherein I gave full sway to all the sweet extravagances, to all the intoxication of moonlight, to all the blooming, nightingale-like fancies once so fondly loved. I know it was "the last free-forest song of Romanticism,"[15] and I am its last poet. With me the old German lyric school ends; while with me, at the same time, the modern lyric school of Germany begins. Writers on German literature will assign to me this double rôle. It would be unseemly for me to speak at length on this subject, but I may with justice claim a liberal space in the history of German Romanticism. For this reason I ought to have included in my account of the Romantic school a review of my own writings. By my omission to do this, a gap has been left which I cannot easily fill. To write a criticism of one's self is an embarrassing, even an impossible task. I should be a conceited coxcomb to obtrude the good I might be able to say of myself, and I should be a great fool to proclaim to the whole world the defects of which I might also be conscious. And even with the most honest desire to be sincere, one cannot tell the truth about oneself. No one has as yet succeeded in doing it, neither Saint Augustine, the pious bishop of Hippo, nor the Genevese Jean Jacques Rousseau--least of all the latter, who proclaimed himself the man of truth and nature, but was really much more untruthful and unnatural than his contemporaries. ...Rousseau, who in his own person also slandered human nature, was yet true to it in respect to our primitive weakness, which consists in always wishing to appear in the eyes of the world as something different from what we really are. His self-portraiture is a lie, admirably executed, but still only a brilliant lie.