distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving
is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls;
and that all earthly enjoyment is but a fleeting and momentary illusion.
When the soul, resting as it were under the willows of exile, [Footnote:
_Trauerweiden der verbannung_, literally _the weeping willows of
banishment_, an allusion, as every reader must know, to the 137th
Psalm. Linnaeus, from this Psalm, calls the weeping willow _Salix
Babylonica_.--TRANS.] breathes out its longing for its distant home,
what else but melancholy can be the key-note of its songs? Hence the
poetry of the ancients was the poetry of enjoyment, and ours is that of
desire: the former has its foundation in the scene which is present, while
the latter hovers betwixt recollection and hope. Let me not be understood
as affirming that everything flows in one unvarying strain of wailing and
complaint, and that the voice of melancholy is always loudly heard. As the
austerity of tragedy was not incompatible with the joyous views of the
Greeks, so that romantic poetry whose origin I have been describing, can
assume every tone, even that of the liveliest joy; but still it will
always, in some indescribable way, bear traces of the source from which it
originated. The feeling of the moderns is, upon the whole, more inward,
their fancy more incorporeal, and their thoughts more contemplative. In
nature, it is true, the boundaries of objects run more into one another,
and things are not so distinctly separated as we must exhibit them in
order to convey distinct notions of them.

The Grecian ideal of human nature was perfect unison and proportion
between all the powers,--a natural harmony. The moderns, on the contrary,
have arrived at the consciousness of an internal discord which renders
such an ideal impossible; and hence the endeavour of their poetry is to
reconcile these two worlds between which we find ourselves divided, and to
blend them indissolubly together. The impressions of the senses are to be