Dramatists, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography; Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616; Stratford-upon-Avon (England) -- Biography
What a shadow this Germany! She is the India of the West. She holds
everything. There is no formation more colossal. In the sacred mist
where the German spirit breathes, Isidro de Seville places theology;
Albert the Great, scholasticism; Raban Maur, the science of language;
Trithemius, astrology; Ottnit, chivalry; Reuchlin, vast curiosity;
Tutilo, universality; Stadianus, method; Luther, inquiry; Albert Dürer,
art; Leibnitz, science; Puffendorf, law; Kant, philosophy; Fichte,
metaphysics; Winckelmann, archæology; Herder, æsthetics; the Vossiuses,
of whom one, Gerard John, was of the Palatinate, learning; Euler, the
spirit of integration; Humboldt, the spirit of discovery; Niebuhr,
history; Gottfried of Strasburg, fable; Hoffman, dreams; Hegel, doubt;
Ancillon, obedience; Werner, fatalism; Schiller, enthusiasm; Goethe,
indifference; Arminius, liberty.
Kepler gives Germany the heavenly bodies.
Gerard Groot, the founder of the Fratres Communis Vitæ, brings his
first attempt at fraternity in the fourteenth century. Whatever may
have been her infatuation for the indifference of Goethe, do not
consider her impersonal, that Germany. She is a nation, and one of
the most generous; for it is for her that Rückert, the military poet,
forges the "geharnischte Sonnette," and she shudders when Körner hurls
at her the Song of the Sword. She is the German fatherland, the great
beloved land, _Teutonia mater._ Galgacus was to the Germans what
Caractacus was to the Britons.
Germany has everything in herself and at home. She shares Charlemagne
with France and Shakespeare with England; for the Saxon element is
mingled with the British element. She has an Olympus,--the Valhalla.
She must have her own style of writing. Ulfilas, Bishop of Moesia,
composes it for her, and the Gothic mode of caligraphy will henceforth
keep its ground along with the writing of Arabia. The capital letter
of a missal strives to outdo in fancy the signature of a caliph. Like
China, Germany has invented printing. Her Burgraves (this remark has
been already made[1]) are to us what the Titans are to Æschylus. To the
temple of Tanfana, destroyed by Germanicus, she caused the cathedral of
Cologne to succeed. She is the grandmother of our history, the grandam
of our legends. From all parts,--from the Rhine to the Danube, from
the Rauhe-Alp, from the ancient _Sylva Gabresa_, from the Lorraine on
the Moselle, and from the ripuarian Lorraine by the Wigalois and the
Wigamur, with Henry the Fowler, with Samo, King of the Vends, with
the chronicler of Thuringia, Rothe, with the chronicler of Alsace,
Twinger, with the chronicler of Limbourg, Gansbein, with all these
ancient popular songsters, Jean Folz, Jean Viol, Muscatblüt, with the
minnesingers, those rhapsodists,--the tale, that form of dream, reaches
her, and enters into her genius. At the same time, idioms are flowing
from her. From her fissures rush, to the north, the Danish and Swedish,
to the west, the Dutch and Flemish.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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