centuries, the spiritual consciousness and life has so entirely changed that the links between the more recent Past and the original point of departure already adverted to are completely severed. This is actually the case with the poet Klopstock in another province of poetry, where he attempts to establish a national religion, and, in order to do so, gives us his Hermann and Thusnelda. We may affirm the same kind of defect of the Nibelungenlied. The Burgundians, the revenge of Chriemhilda, the exploits of Siegfried, the entire social condition, the fated downfall of an entire race and many like facts--all this is no longer vitally held together with the domestic, civil, and judicial life, the institutions and constitutions of the present day. The biography of Jesus Christ, with its Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and Roman jurisdiction, even the Trojan war itself, come home to ourselves far more nearly than the events of the Niebelungen; the latter are for present consciousness a state of things wholly gone for ever, swept away once and for all with a besom. To attempt to compose of such something of national significance, to say nothing of a national bible, betokens the extreme limit of folly and superficiality. In times when it was rashly[4] assumed that the flame of youthful enthusiasm had flashed up anew, such a conceit was taken as a proof of the sere leaf of an age once more become childlike in the approach of death; and it refreshed itself with a past that was dead, and deemed it possible to associate others with a similar refreshment and renewed presence.