Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature by August Wilhelm Schlegel
page 34 of 644 (05%)
action, which like the articles of faith, were elevated far beyond the
investigation of a casuistical reasoning.

Chivalry, love, and honour, together with religion itself, are the
subjects of that poetry of nature which poured itself out in the Middle
Ages with incredible fulness, and preceded the more artistic cultivation
of the romantic spirit. This age had also its mythology, consisting of
chivalrous tales and legends; but its wonders and its heroism were the
very reverse of those of the ancient mythology.

Several inquirers who, in other respects, entertain the same conception of
the peculiarities of the moderns, and trace them to the same source that
we do, have placed the essence of the northern poetry in melancholy; and
to this, when properly understood, we have nothing to object.

Among the Greeks human nature was in itself all-sufficient; it was
conscious of no defects, and aspired to no higher perfection than that
which it could actually attain by the exercise of its own energies. We,
however, are taught by superior wisdom that man, through a grievous
transgression, forfeited the place for which he was originally destined;
and that the sole destination of his earthly existence is to struggle to
regain his lost position, which, if left to his own strength, he can never
accomplish. The old religion of the senses sought no higher possession
than outward and perishable blessings; and immortality, so far as it was
believed, stood shadow-like in the obscure distance, a faint dream of this
sunny waking life. The very reverse of all this is the case with the
Christian view: every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation
of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our
real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave. Such a religion must
waken the vague foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling heart, into a
DigitalOcean Referral Badge