is that its truest literary achievements are in a department in which no other Aryan people has excelled, and which is really as alien to the German as to the French and English intellect. The hymns of Paul Flemming, and especially of Paul Gerhardt, surpass even those of their English contemporaries, George Herbert and Vaughan,-deserving to be classed with those of Luther, and only inferior to the great Hebrew outbursts. Gerhardt, a Lutheran pastor, long resident in Berlin, — losing his place through his opposition to certain plans of the Great Elector,—was a model of piety. He wrote one hundred and twenty songs, which are outpourings of the truest devoutness, almost without exception faultless examples of the poetry of religion.

The prose of the seventeenth century offers still less that is worthy of attention than the poetry. Those who wrote, in large majority, preferred to use Latin, even when their knowledge of that language was most imperfect; where German was the medium, it was so interlarded with foreign expressions that it became scarcely recognizable as German, the mongrel result receiving from Leibnitz the name of "Misch-masch." If it were the history of philosophy, instead of belles-lettres, that was our subject, a large space would be needed for the great name of Leibnitz. Like the scholars of his time in general, however, he turned his back on his native tongue, writing little except in Latin and French. It deserves to be mentioned that he did so unwill

1 Sime's Life of Lessing.

ingly, in the idea that circumstances forced him to it. A paper in German, in which he criticised severely the "Misch-masch" of his time, and pleaded earnestly for the culture of his native language, is one of the light streaks amid the darkness. Other such streaks are that his disciple Wolf thought it worth while to spread abroad his master's theories in German; and that a bold professor at Halle (Thomasius) ventured, amid the execrations of the learned world, to lecture to his students in their mother tongue.

The two hundred years from the death of Luther to the middle of the eighteenth century are a time of night, not absolutely rayless, but full of gloom most oppressive. England saw meanwhile the Elizabethan period, France the age of Louis XIV. But the land so long silent and dark was to be glorified in its turn by the sun-burst.

Opitz should receive more extended mention than the few lines devoted to him on page 237. Not much genuine poetic spirit appears in his verses, but his celebrated critical treatise, "Von der Deutschen Poeterei," gave German poetry a nobler and more artistic form. Opitz restored dignity to poetic expression. Through his influence, the laws of prosody which prevail even at the present day were recognized and established. It can, moreover, be said

for Opitz, that, at a time when the literature of Germany was at its lowest, he won for poetry written in his native tongue a respectful hearing among the learned and powerful-an achievement which he accomplished by a wise choice of subjects and a treatment which gained respect.

PART II.-THE SECOND GREAT PERIOD.

CHAPTER X.

LESSING.

We have considered the dreariness of the Thirty Years' War, and the long period of exhaustion which followed, during which, in literature, so few names appear deserving of mention. We have now reached the eighteenth century. In one state of Germany, at least, a strong man has appeared as ruler whose work has done something toward lifting the Germans from their depression. The great elector, at the end of the seventeenth century, has laid the foundations of the power of Prussia, giving place, at his death, to the first king, who in turn gives way to the memorable Frederick William I. The reader of Carlyle's Frederick will retain forever the vivid portrait of the coarse, rugged, eccentricsometimes almost insane-old monarch, who yet possessed a certain heroism, and set in some ways, for a corrupt time, an example of honesty. When the sceptre falls from his hand it is grasped by the great Frederick, a soul no less marked for command than the mightiest leaders. With him Prussia becomes great; the rest of Germany, however, continues to languish, a figure with noble traits, like that of Maria Theresa, and Karl August of Weimar, now and then appearing, but the rulers for the

most part the most despicable of their class, devoid of patriotism, rotten with vices, unscrupulous in tyranny, to the extent of selling their subjects for foreign wars like sheep for the shambles. France, towering to the west, subordinates everything. When the glory of Louis XIV. is extinguished, the prestige of the foreigner is undiminished; for the most part, in the hundred petty courts of Germany, we behold a world of apes, whose talk, whose dress, whose manners, whose revolting vices, are patterned after those of the riotous society which was ground to pieces at length for its sins between the jaws of a monster, the French revolution.1

Before the middle of the eighteenth century a critic and poet appears in Leipsic - Gottschedwho, although himself an imitator, and seeing no possibilities for German literature except by following in the track of France, was in several ways helpful; perhaps he was most so as an obstacle to be striven against by the champions who needed some such gymnastic to help them in the acquisition of strength,— champions destined to bring in a better time. In opposition to Gottsched-who was of sufficient importance to become the centre of a considerable school-stood certain Swiss writers living at Zürich, Bodmer and Breitinger; also men who came to have many adherents, who liked English models, as Gottsched liked the French, and who also brushed the dust off of some of the long-forgotten treasures, holding them up to be admired and

1 Vehse: Geschichte der europäischen Höfe.

imitated; in particular they brought to light the long-lost Nibelungen Lied. We must not forget the real deserts of these pioneers, discredited and superseded though they were as time went on. Through Gottsched the fantastic unnaturalness of the Second Silesian School was overcome. The effort of these affected writers after pompous and learned periods had produced a style than which nothing could be worse; in opposition to which the Leipsig critic, though with a theory in some ways quite erroneous, strove for purity, and a dignity that should not be stilted. The great writers of the age of Louis XIV. had but just passed away, and it was natural that Gottsched should have seen in them the best models for the writers of his own race. He found little in English literature worthy of notice, and felt, with Voltaire, that even Shakespeare was a wild barbarian, whose genius could not atone for his rudeness. The Swiss, on the other hand, Bodmer and Breitinger, liked the English. They established a periodical after the plan of the "Spectator;" they found fault with French writers as too formal and artificial, and demanded nature. All this Gottsched fought valiantly; he was really a stalwart character, having in him the stuff of a soldier; indeed, he had to flee from home in his youth to avoid the recruiting officers, who saw in him material for a grenadier. He declared that English poets would never receive recognition in Germany,much less be imitated,―sounding all the time the praises of the French. Before giving up Gottsched I must quote from the autobiography of Göthe an