cal ideas that, fragmentary though they were, will never be forgotten, and it produced some enduring poetry and romance, in addition to what Goethe and Schiller wrote, and of no small merit at that. Now from these circles of the younger geniuses, one especially stands out in interesting prominence. It is the circle which delighted to call itself the Romantic School. From its often crude efforts sprang a movement, the romantic movement in a wider sense, which lasted far on into our own century. It is this romantic movement in the wider sense that has proved the most characteristic outcome of modern German life as it was before 1848. To the romantic movement must be credited the whole wealth of German tales and songs that we love best after the greatest works of Goethe and of Schiller. The same general movement had its part in nourishing and in inspiring the music of modern Germany from Beethoven to Wagner. In brief, without this movement, German thought and German emotion would have no such meaning as they have for us to-day.
But in the narrower sense, the name Romantic School was originally applied only to the little company of young men, all born somewhere between 1765 and 1775, of whom the most prominent were the two Schlegels, Augustus and his brother Friedrich, Ludwig Tieck, romancer and dramatist, Novalis (whose real name was Friedrich v. Hardenberg), the philosopher Schelling, and the theologian Schleiermacher. The Schlegels were the critics of the school, and were also men of considerable metaphysical interest. Novalis, who died very young, touches, in his fragmentary remains, upon all the characteristic interests of the romanticists; he is philosophical, poetical, critical; but he is everywhere and always the born dreamer. Schelling was intimately associated in a personal sense with all his fellow romanticists. If his intense metaphysical tastes kept him from attempting very seriously either dramas or romances, his early speculations bear
