Boyhood at Frankfort; Description of his early Home, and Places associated with him; Life at Strass- burg; his extraordinary Impressibility; Brilliancy of his Early Fame; Description of Weimar; his Göthe as a Poet; his Contrast with Schiller; the Lyrics; the Epics; "Hermann and Dorothea; " His Life and Character; Hardships of his Boyhood; his early Fame; Contrast with Göthe: Schiller's Prose; as a Historian; as a Speculative Philoso- pher; his Lyrics; "The Song of the Bell;" The Ballads; the Dramas; the Constant Growth of his Influences at Present affecting Literature; the Broth- ers Grimm; Great Names of the Present Time; Anticipations; Means for Culture; Probable Effect PART I.-THE FIRST PERIOD OF BLOOM. CHAPTER I. THE BEGINNINGS. The German tongue belongs to the great Aryan family of languages. At a time very remote, the parent speech from which it was derived from which too were derived in the East the Sanscrit and the Persian, and in the West the Greek, the Latin, the Celtic, and the Sclavonic-was spoken somewhere upon the highlands in Central Asia, or perhaps upon a continent, now submerged, lying to the south of Asia, of which the great island-world of Oceanica is a remainder. From indications contained in the descendant languages we may know that the primeval tribe was not utterly rude. Perhaps it was due to a certain degree of civilization they reached that they gained the upper-hand in the early world. At any rate, they multiplied, swarmed forth from their homes, sent emigrants to people India, and westward to take possession of Europe. The Hellenic race, developed from these, plays its part in Greece; as its force expires, the Italic race, in the neighboring peninsula, establishes the glory of Rome. This in turn culminates and decays. Then step upon the scene the Teutons, whose empire was to last far longer, perhaps to be far mightier 1 Ernst Haeckel: Schöpfungsgeschichte. and more brilliant, than its predecessors; to what extent grander we cannot say, for the end is not yet. The name German, full of picturesque suggestion as it is, "Shouters in battle," occurs first in Herodotus, in the fifth century before Christ. They were fully established in Europe when history begins; yet we cannot assign their immigration to a very ancient date, for at our first knowledge of them the remembrance of their former home remains vivid in the people, expressed in legends, institutions, and social customs. In the time of Alexander the Great, Pytheas of Massilia, a wandering merchant of that colony of Greece, having reached the Baltic shore, gives some account of the Teutons and Guthons; he was, however, not believed by the writers of his time. It is probable that the Germanic wave, sweeping into Europe from the East, had poured across Russia and thence into Scandinavia, and was now beginning to work southward. Again there is a period of silence until the second century before Christ, when Papirius Carbo, a Roman consul appointed to fight with the Celts in Noricum, comes unexpectedly upon an enemy far more powerful, a vast migrating people, whose men are of huge strength and fierce courage, whose women are scarcely less formidable, whose children are white-haired, like people grown aged, and are bold-eyed and vigorous. Upon their great white shields they slide down the slopes of the Alps to do battle; they have armor of brass and helmets fashioned into a resemblance of the heads of beasts of prey. The women fight by the side of their husbands; then, as priestesses, slay the prisoners, letting |