Goethe's Maerchen which concluded his Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderter, published in Schiller's Horen in 1795, was enthusiastically received by all early romanticists. August Wilhelm Schlegel wrote a review of Goethe's fairy tale immediately after its publication, which represented the delight of his whole generation on the eve of the literary movement of romanticism:

… Was aber alles Belehrende und Ergötzende in den vorigen Unterhaltungen dahinten läßt, was ein sanftes Wohlgefallen in das lebhafteste Vergnügen verwandelt, ist das Maerchen, zu dem wir durch treSende Winke über das Wesen der Phantasie vorbereitet werden. Sie gaukelt uns alsdann das lieblichste Märchen vor, das je von ihrem Himmel auf die diirre Erde herabgefallen ist. Alle ihre Jugend und Fröhlichkeit scheint wach geworden zu sein … nie gab es einen liebenswürdigeren Schmerz als den der süßen Lilie; ueberhaupt erregt sie ein Gefühl, als wenn man den Duft der Blume, deren Name sie führt, in freier Luft einatmete … es ist eine Zeichnung, bei der man nicht ohne Ergötzen verweilen kann … so schwebt das ganze Märchen hin, und wer sich nicht an ihm erfreuen wollte, müßte wenigstens nicht mit unbefangnem Geist sich belustigen können oder alle Werke, woran die Einbildungskraft allein teilhat, lästig linden. Alsdann könnte es ihn vielleicht noch unterhalten, nach einem haltbaren Faden der Deutung zu suchen, welches wir noch nicht unternommen haben.

There has long existed a need for a full and definitive calendar of theatrical performances in London during the eighteenth century. If the modern scholar does not have access to the original sources—the theatrical advertisements, the playbills, and manuscript diaries and account books—he must turn to a number of modern histories, of the eighteenth century stage, no one of which is complete and all of which combined do not offer a full listing of day-to-day performances. The account of the stage published in 1832 by John Genest is still the most comprehensive for the entire century, but Genest made a selection, not a complete listing, of performances, and that fact alone makes it impossible to find in his pages the stage history of a play or its casting or the vogue of the works of a single dramatist. The handlists in Allardyce Nicoll's works are also very valuable, but they too have the limitation of recording only selected performances, primarily those of plays first performed in the century. Dougald MacMillan's calendar of Drury Lane offerings from 1747 to 1776 is a more complete listing, but it is a record of only one theater, and although it offers the casts, it does not reflect the rôle of the entertainments in the theatrical programs.

Although Emile Montégut's work on American writers has been given some attention, there has been little attempt to assess the validity and significance of his criticism. It is an interesting fact that American literature received its first extensive treatment in France not from an admirer of American democracy, but from a political conservative, an opponent of the French Revolution. A modest and retiring person, who saw only grounds for pessimism in the political trends of the nineteenth century, who felt a nostalgic longing for a supposedly more stable and well-ordered past, who feared the progress and consequences of industrialism, Montégut might seem the least likely of critics to judge American literature rightly and with sympathetic understanding. Yet his writing on English literature is of recognized merit, he has been highly praised by men like Victor Giraud and George Saintsbury, and his complete Shakespeare is one of the major French translations of the poet. When such a writer devotes more than a score of articles to American literature and life (1847–76), his contribution can scarcely be overlooked.

Johann Caspar Lavater is one of the three writers personally known to Goethe whose names are mentioned most often in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The other two are Herder and Merck: Herder, whose stimulating influence on Goethe may be easily discerned in countless passages of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers and whose Vont Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele has been suggested “as a more probable (and more systematic) source of psychological information for Goethe than the vague ‘Sturm-und-Drang-Psychologie’ sometimes indicated as the framework of the novel”; Merck—“dieser eigne Mann, der auf mein Leben den größten Einfluß gehabt”, Goethe declares in Dichtung und Wahrheit—who in 1772 played a rôle in Goethe's life very like that of the far blinder and less effectual Wilhelm in the story of Werther, and who in 1774 insisted that Goethe submit Die Leiden des jungen Werthers for publication without making any revisions in the manuscript.

The attack on the accepted chronology of the Waverley Novels began in 1932, the year of the Scott centennial. In a letter to the Edinburgh Scotsman, Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, who had just published a successful biography, launched an assault on what she considered the most vulnerable work in the canon from the point of view of chronology, St. Ronan's Weil. Universally accepted as the eighteenth member of the series, this novel seemed to Dame Una, “after careful consideration and re-reading”, far more likely to be the first in time of composition, and because of its suggestive allusions to the period of Scott's courtship, she expressed the belief that “the major portion” must have been written, not in 1823, but in 1797–98—twenty-five years before it was actually sent to press, and sixteen years before the completion of Waverley (1814), Scott's celebrated first novel.

In an era when many English writers were becoming identified with a single publisher, Walter Savage Landor distinguished himself by the singularity of dealing with perhaps more publishers than any other writer in English literature. Not taking into account the editors of periodicals, Landor's separate volumes (sometimes, to be sure, mere pamphlets) made their appearance from the houses of at least twenty-eight publishers in the seventy years of his productivity. The story of his relations with his publishers, then, will obviously not be a simple one, and yet it throws a great deal of light both on Landor himself and on the condition of his text.

Browning's “ring” metaphor has remained for seventy-nine years one of the most baffling figures of speech in English poetry His critics do not differ concerning either the formation of a gold ring or the poet's intention in his metaphor, but they differ greatly on the applicability of the metaphor. One group believes Browning to have said that the contribution made by his fancy disappeared at the completion of the poem. Its members therefore insist that Browning, in The Ring and the Book, reproduced faithfully the facts of the Old Yellow Book. They have attempted to explain that he was at once a scientific historian in his treatment of fact and a poet in his treatment of truth. They have been unwilling to discredit his historical accuracy or to admit that he was not first of all a poet.

Wir sind heuté in der Lage, die Stimmen der bedeutenden Männer unserer Zeit auf Sprechplatte und Film der Nachwelt überliefern zu können, doch die Stimmen der großen Geister früherer Zeitalter sind fur immer mit dem letzten Atemzug ihrer Träger verstummt. So wenig die Nachwelt dem Mimen Kränze flicht, weil es ihr unmoglich ist, sich noch von seiner Darstellung hinreifien zu lassen, ebensowenig wird sie bewundernd oder gerührt der lebendigen Rede des großen Dichters lauschen können, der selbst ins Grab gesunken nur noch in seinen Werken lebt.

In the studies devoted to the literary growth of Novalis the roots that lower into the realm of Shakespearean art and thought have strangely been overlooked. Such omission is not entirely unwarranted in view of the seeming disparity in substance and character between the works of the two poets. And yet the assumption that Novalis should have remained impervious to the “fine frenzy” of Shakespeare, when all of his friends and literary companions came under the spell of it, must give us pause. Literary “influences” do not always proceed along the path of material evidence; they are forces that often come to light in forms and directions which we least expect. A poet as sensitive and unpredictable as Novalis is no exception; he strove to be unique and master of his own existence and style, although the evidence shows that the poetic art of Shakespeare vitally contributed to the fruition of the Hymnen an die Nacht.

In Classical Latin a small number of past participles had the ending -utus, e. g., argutus (arguo), locutus (loquor), secutus (sequor), solutus (solvo), volutus (volvo). In Vulgar Latin there is a proliferation of the -utus form, encroaching not only on -itus, but also on -atus. This verb form, so fecund in other parts of Romance territory, was common in Old Spanish but disappeared soon after the thirteenth century. The modern Spanish suffix -udo is an adjectival form which seems to spring rather from -utus forms which were already adjectives in Classical Latin, e.g., canutus, cornutus, nasutus. Meyer-Lubke says that -utus “jouit … en roman d'une vogue extraordinaire”, that “il indique très souvent … non la possession en général, mais une propriété extraordinaire, qui frappe: nasutus ne signifie pas simplement ‘pourvu d'un nez,’ mais ‘pourvu d'un grand nez’ etc.”

It was inevitable that sooner or later the Wandering Jew, probably the most celebrated of all parcoureurs du monde, should come to be regarded as omniscient as well as ubiquitous. After all, he had been alive since the beginnings of the Christian era, and there was no spot in the generally known world of the Occident where he had not at one time or another passed by or spent his allotted period of residence. In his privileged condition of one who was all-wise, it would be easy for him, if he were so disposed, to assume the mantle of teacher and prophet, with a particular liking for history and geography; but he need not confine himself to those two subjects. The neo-classical age, which developed his didactic powers, sometimes appealed to him for social comment, criticism, and satire.

The action of the central autobiographical passage (lines 267–383) of Epipsychidion runs roughly as follows. The poet, in his search for love, first encountered several “mortal forms”, some of them “fair”, others “wise”, one of them “not true”; then, for some unexplained reason he entered a period of emotional crisis—“stood at bay, wounded and weak and panting” (272-275)—from which he was rescued by one whom he compares to his ideal of love as the Moon to the Sun. At first, we gather, he was enchanted with this moonlike love (276–280) but later began to realize that she was “cold” (281–307) :

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed;
Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

The marked loneliness of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's literary career and position must impress even a casual observer. Not that she lacked affinities with the literature of her time. It is easy to point out Romantic elements in her: her cult of the past, particularly the legends and ancient customs of her homeland; her predilection for “die Nacht-seite der Natur”, the weird, the supernatural; her occasional irony; her conviction that “Sehnsucht” is the true source of poetic inspiration. It is easy, on the other hand, to point out in her work the emergent Realism which was to succeed Romanticism (though there is more of it already present in Romanticism than is generally recognized). In conscious opposition to “einer gewissen romantischen Schule”, Annette insisted “dass ich nur im Naturgetreuen, durch Poésie veredelt, etwas leisten kann”, thus defining herself as a Poetic Realist in the very heyday of Young Germany.

In den Jahren 1891–97 veröffentlichte Hofmannsthal in Wiener Zeitungen und Zeitschriften eine Reine von Essays über die Literatur, die Kunst, und das Theater seiner Zeit. Erst 1930, ein Jahr nach dem Tode des Dichters, erschienen diese Aufsätze gesammelt unter dem Titel Loris, dem Pseudonym des jungen Hofmannsthal. Die meisten von ihnen beschäftigen sich mit einzelnen Persönlichkeiten—Barres, Amiel, Pater, Swinburne, Ibsen, Bahr, Stefan George, Eleonora Duse—aber es sind auch solche darunter, die allgemeine Problème zum Thema haben, wie der Vortrag über Poésie und Leben, order der Bericht über die Mozartfeier in Salzburg.

After The Tempest, The Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan are now the happiest hunting-ground for the symbolist. Mr. Wilson Knight's interpretation of both poems, but particularly of the latter, in The Starlit Dome (1941), is, to say the least, extraordinary; still more so than the similar one of Mr. Robert Graves in The Meaning of Dreams (1924), though not so entangled with inaccurate biography and irrelevant psychoanalysis. “We may imagine a sexual union,” says Mr. Knight, between life, the masculine, and death, the feminine. Then our “romantic chasm” and “cedarn cover,” the savage and enchanted yet holy place with its “half intermitted burst” may be, in spite of our former reading, vaguely related to the functioning of man's creative organs and their physical setting and, too, to all principles of manly and adventurous action; while the caverns that engulf the sacred river will be correspondingly feminine with a dark passivity and infinite peace. The pleasure-dome we may fancy as the pleasure of a sexual union in which birth and death are the great contesting partners, with human existence as the life-stream, the blood-stream, of a mighty coition [p. 95].

Wordsworthians have long been puzzled and perhaps a little distressed by the poet's apparent shift in political opinion. It is curious that in all the discussion that has resulted no one has said much about Wordsworth's rather vigorous life as a man of business. The story begins with the popular picture of Wordsworth “virtuous, simple, and unaffectedly restricting every want and wish to the bounds of a very narrow income”, with his “little cottage, and the sister and wife dressing the mutton leg in the same room where it was to be eat.” There is probably some truth behind this picture, though it belongs to an earlier period than that of Scott's letter. For some years after his father's death (1784) Wordsworth very likely had more expectations than cash. But since his uncles and guardians were prepared to contribute almost 460 to his college expenses, Wordsworth's only real hardship must have been in not having his own money at hand. Moreover Wordsworth's father, who, in succession to his father and to his cousin, John Robinson, the favorite of George II, had been attorney and land-agent to the Earl of Lonsdale, left only part of his estate tied up in the famous debt owed by the Earl. It is difficult to determine the size of the remainder. Words worth's elder brother, had about 100 a year; and there seems to have been other real and personal property. Gordon Wordsworth, working from the account of his greatgrandfather, lists the following property as belonging at some time to John Wordsworth: the Sockbridge estate; “the various ‘Cattle Gates’ upon the moor”; Ingmire Close, which he had bought from his father-in-law, and which gave him a vote in Cumberland; two fields near Cockermouth, which had cost 200; and “other small properties in various parts of Cumberland.” And the other children must have had some share in an estate at Newbiggin, in Westmorland.