“Still these last years in Germany have not been without some good work done, though often achieved under the spur of wrong ideals and improper motives. From the days of ’48, when Young Germany felt for the first time the seductive charm of revolutionism, a new feeling has possessed German literature—a feeling that the past is past and out of date, potent once but potent no longer, and that the new age of man demands new principles, new ideals, a new faith. And so the modern literature, particularly so since 1870, has been marked by iconoclasm and startling innovation; it has discarded sentiment and line writing, and made a plea for scientific methods, with the privilege of exhibiting exact, scientific results. Crimes, disease, and grinning skeletons have been dragged forth to the public gaze, for art is no longer art that portrays the ideal and not the true. Such, in short, is the creed by which the realistic or naturalistic school has thought to overthrow the old, conventional, and frivolous, to foster the spirit of the new nationality, and prepare a balm for the wounds of the poor. “Two men stand to-day as leaders of this new movement,—Hermann Sudermann and Gerhardt Hauptmann,—the most commanding figures in contemporaneous German literature.” During the nineteenth century the United States took a high and firm place in the domain of literature, and, it may be said, has evolved a literature that in scope and style is peculiar to her institutions and environment. Her array of authors, both in number and reputation, compares favorably with that of countries boasting of a thousand years of literary domination, and her literature is as diversified and practical as her activities. Among the many illustrious historians of the century she numbers her Bancroft, her Hildreth, her Prescott, her Motley, worthy counterparts of England’s Lingard, Hallam, Macaulay, Buckle, and Kinglake. Among her poets are Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, Halleck, fit companions of Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth, Scott, Swinburne. Among her novelists are Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, worthy congeners of Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot. And so, the comparison holds in travel, philosophy, theology, law, and science.