(_c_) The manner in which, therefore, romantic art gives to itself a real embodiment agreeably to the spirit of the principle above indicated, and on the side of its external appearance, is not one which essentially overleaps the ordinary presentment of reality: it is by no means averse to accept as cover for itself real existence in its finite defects and definition. That beauty therefore disappears from it, which tended to raise the outside envisagement above the soilure of Time, and the traces that unite it with a Past, in order to declare the beauty of existence in its blossom in the room of what had otherwise been a dismantled image. Romantic art has no longer for its aim the freedom and life of existence in its infinite tranquillity and absorption of the soul in the bodily presence; no more a life such as _this_ arrests it. It turns its back on this pinnacle of beauty. It interweaves the threads of its soul experience with the contingent material of Nature's workshop, and gives unfettered play to the emphatic features of ugliness itself. We have, in short, two worlds included in the Romantic, a spiritual realm essentially complete in itself, the soul-kingdom, which finds reconciliation in its own sphere, and therewith the otherwise straightforward repetition of birth, death, and resurrection now for the first time perfected in the true circular orbit, doubled back in the return upon itself, the genuine Phoenix life of Spirit. On the other hand, there is the realm of external Nature simply as such, which, released as it is from its secure association and union with Spirit, becomes now a completely empirical reality, concerning the form of which the soul cares little or nothing. In classical art Spirit controlled the empirical phenomenon and transpierced it through and through, because it was the very thing which it had to accept as its completed reality. But now the ideal kingdom is indifferent to the mode of configuration in the world of immediate sense, because this immediacy is beneath the sphere of the blessedness of essential soul-life. The external phenomenon is no longer able to express this inward life; and if any call is made upon it for this purpose, it merely is utilized to make plain that the external show is an existence which does not satisfy, and is forced to point back by suggestion to the spiritual content, the soul and its emotions, as the truly essential medium. Precisely for the same reason romantic art suffers externality on its own part to go on its way freely; and in this respect permits all and every material, flowers, trees, and so on, down to the most ordinary domestic utensils, to appear in its productions just as they are, and as the chance of natural circumstance may arrange them. Such a content as this, however, carries at the same time with it the result, that as purely exterior matter, its worth is of no validity and insignificant; it only receives