success in his wonder-seeking times.

Rousseau's influence, the ideas of universal reform, the example of
England, proud and free, but still more, the enthusiasm excited by the
American war of independence, inflamed many heads in Germany and
raised a poetical opposition, which began with the bold-spirited
Schubart, whose liberal opinions threw him into a prison, but whose
spirit still breathed in his songs and roused that of his great
countryman, Schiller. The first cry of the oppressed people was, by
Schiller, repeated with a prophet's voice. In him their woes found an
eloquent advocate. Lessing had vainly appealed to the understanding,
but Schiller spoke to the heart, and if the seed, sown by him, fell
partially on corrupt and barren ground, it found a fostering soil in
the warm, unadulterated hearts of the youth of both sexes. He recalled
his fellow-men, in those frivolous times, to a sense of self-respect,
he restored to innocence the power and dignity of which she had been
deprived by ridicule, and became the champion of liberty, justice, and
his country, things from which the love of pleasure and the
aristocratic self-complacency, exemplified in Goethe, had gradually
and completely Weaned succeeding poets. Klinger, at the same time,
coarsely portrayed the vices of the church and state, and Meyern
extravagated in his romance "Dya-Na-Sore" on Utopian happiness. The
poems of Muller, the painter, are full of latent warmth. Burger,
Pfeffel, the blind poet, and Claudius, gave utterance, in Schubart's
coarse manner, to a few trite truisms. Musaeus was greatly admired for
his amusing popular stories. As for the rest, it seemed as though the
spiritless writers of that day had found it more convenient to be
violent and savage in their endless chivalric pieces and romances
than, like Schiller, steadily and courageously to attack the vices and
evils of their age. Their fire but ended in smoke. Babo and Ziegler