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The impulse that sent me to study in Germany came from America—something for which America is to be thanked; yet the failure of that adventure in my case was connected with its origin. I was too much enveloped in my American (and afterwards in my English) associations to lose myself in the German scene, to learn German properly, and to turn a copious German “spiritual” stream into my private channel. In my Germany there was, and there still is, too much of me and too little of Germany.

Some recommendation that I have forgotten led me in the early autumn of 1886 to Göttingen, with the idea of learning a little more German than the very little that I knew. I lived in a boarding-house kept by Frau Pastorin Schlote, whose elderly daughter—not the Irma of The Last Puritan, who is imaginary—knew English and gave the foreign boarders lessons in German. I learned enough to understand lectures and formal conversation from the first; but there was no one with whom I could begin to talk, and with my dislike of drudgery, I turned rather to deciphering for myself, with the help of a grammar and a dictionary, texts that were worth reading on their own account: Deutsche Lyrik, Heine and Wilhelm Meister. I made good progress of a sort, for my own ends, but without thoroughness; and my tongue remained torpid and my inflections inaccurate. “Sie sprechen sehr nett,” the superior housekeeper said one day when I excused myself, “die Endungen aber fehlen.” Two or three months later in Berlin my landlady and her friends one day were discussing me, when her daughter observed that I was in my room and could hear them through the thin door. “Der versteht ja nichts,” her mother cried impatiently, and went on wondering at my solitary life, that I went out for a walk alone and all the rest of the day sat working in my room. I understood every word perfectly: but in conversation I was helpless; there were no people with whom I cared to talk; and my punishment was that I never learned to speak the language.

From Göttingen I went to Dresden where Herbert Lyman had invited me to join him. I say “invited” because although I paid for my lodging, breakfast and midday dinner, he paid everything else for both of us, our way of living being entirely beyond the means of a student on half a Fellowship. We took a daily German lesson, and a daily walk; and in the evening, or rather in the afternoon—for the performances began at five or half-past five o’clock—we went to the Royal Theatre, hearing an opera or a play on alternate nights. The play often was Shakespeare, in the excellent German version. I remember Julius Cæsar particularly, a play that is not often done in English, I suppose because it is hardly a play for a star, like Hamlet or Othello; but the dutiful German State Company performed it with zeal and good judgment. We had an ample feast of Wagner, with Gudehus and Malten: old stand-bys but still adequate, singing and acting with a devout enthusiasm that was contagious. And after the theatre we had another treat that must not go unrecorded: an enormous delicious sweet omelette or Pfannkuchen, hot and crisp at the edges in its great pewter platter, followed by bread and cheese and a flagon of beer.

Memorable and important for me were these Dresden impressions: and I should include the lesson in architecture taught me by the Zwingler, the Royal Palace, and the Katholische Kirche; a lesson reinforced many years later by the monuments at Nancy. Baroque and rococo cannot be foreign to a Spaniard. They are profoundly congenial and Quixotic, suspended as it were between two contrary insights: that in the service of love and imagination nothing can be too lavish, too sublime, or too festive; yet that all this passion is a caprice, a farce, a contortion, a comedy of illusions.

All these wonderful things, besides the Madonna di San Sisto and everything else in the picture gallery, I saw while I stood side by side with Herbert Lyman, an intelligent observer who knew much more than I about music, yet a typical Yankee, cold, shrewd and spare inwardly, smiling with a sort of insulated incredulity at everything passionate, as if he lived inside a green glass bottle, warranted an absolute non-conductor. He condemned nothing, yet nothing seemed to make any difference in him. Why was he such a devoted friend of mine? We had no special interests in common, and I should not have distinguished him particularly from other kind and correct Bostonians if he had not shown such a marked and constant friendliness towards me. The secret of this was perhaps revealed by his younger sister one day at table in their house in Beacon Street, opposite the Common, the place where perfect Bostonians ought to live. The conversation had turned on summer resorts, and I said that I went every year to Europe, because the heat in New England was intolerable. This was tactless of me, since the Lymans had a luxurious ancestral house in Waltham near Boston which it would have been a crime for them not to occupy in summer, no matter what heat they might suffer there. However, I had smiled as I spoke, as if I couldn’t really mean what I said. “Oh, thank you,” cried the younger Miss Lyman, “we can’t say that ourselves, but it’s such a relief to hear it!” I expect that I said a good many things that it was a relief for her brother to hear. I was an exciting, slightly dangerous friend, yet not exactly disreputable, since I was by way of becoming a professor at Harvard. I could be acknowledged and cultivated and invited to the house. Moreover I had Bostonian connections. My sister was an intimate friend of Miss Sara Lowell, Herbert Lyman’s own aunt, his mother’s sister! Possibly he had heard of me before he had seen me, and that made such a difference in Boston! If my half-foreign sister was all right, why shouldn’t I, at least educated in Boston, be all right also? He had very simple tastes; he liked my comic verses and would sing them to popular airs; for silly as the words were they could be sung without offence in any drawing-room. Yes, the partiality of the excellent Herbert for me was explicable. Other Bostonians, though they might not share it, could understand it. I was such a relief!

He not only sang a little, but would have liked to devote himself entirely to music. How, in what capacity? As a composer, as a performer, or merely as a critic, like “Billy” Apthorp in the Boston Transcript? Music would be an acceptable profession if you could begin by being famous. It was not acceptable if you were to begin at the foot of the ladder, and perhaps remain there. Herbert, who hadn’t a great voice or a precocious talent, must therefore go into business. Yet there was no hurry about it. He might go to Germany for a year or two and study music. He would enjoy the Boston Symphony concerts all the more intensely every Saturday evening for the rest of his life. And his German musical holiday might well begin at Dresden. Now I was going to Germany too, where term at the universities didn’t begin until the middle of November. Why shouldn’t I spend the interval at Dresden? We could then learn German together, and have a good time as well. We had a very good time, but I, at least, didn’t learn much German; I learned only what sufficed for my secret purpose—secret I mean even to myself. The purpose on which my heart was naturally set. This was not at all to be proficient in languages or to be a professor of philosophy, but to see and to understand the world. For this purpose our month or six weeks in Dresden was not merely a good preparation. It was a culminating point, one of the happiest episodes in my whole life.

I used at that time to sum up my first impressions of Germany by saying that there were three good things there: the uniforms, the music, and the beer. The formula was playful, yet it might still serve to express my sentiments if its terms were taken symbolically. Uniforms—which at that time were ornate and many-coloured, some sky-blue and silver, others white and gold—would stand for discipline and the glory of discipline. Music would stand for idealism, understood to mean love of ideal and immaterial things, of pure science and free imagination, and not “idealism” about material things, concealing or falsifying the truth about them. Finally Bier would stand for Gemütlichkeit, for joy in hearty, fleshly, kindly, homely, droll little things. How very much these three German virtues, when not exaggerated into vices, redeem the human soul from disorder, from servitude, and from spleen!

Berlin after Dresden seemed big, modern and ugly; but modernness, ugliness and bigness were familiar to me. I could live my own life in the midst of them, and so I did here. There were morning lectures with an interval of an hour between them: which I spent at the Museum, or at the Café Bauer over the English papers and a coffee with whipped cream. There was then a full dinner at half-past one o’clock, in a restaurant upstairs near the Friedrichstrasse. It was so copious that, although this was my only solid meal, I usually skipped the boiled meat and vegetables, contenting myself with soup, fish, roast meat with vegetables, compote, and salad, and a dessert; washed down with half-bottle of white wine. The whole expense was three marks, two for the dinner, fifty pfennig for the wine, twenty-five for the coffee and the same for the waiter. I always sat at the same table, being one of the first to arrive, was expected, well received, and came to feel quite at home. I had a small room up many flights in the Louisenplatz, with a porcelain stove like a tomb in which a few diminutive cubes of synthetic fuel were burned every twenty-four hours. They did not make the room warm, but kept it from being too cold to sit in, warmly dressed, with a rug over one’s legs. My landlady supplied coffee and rolls in the morning, and bread and cheese with a bottle of beer in the evening: so that after a good walk in the Thiergarten I would go home and devote the rest of the day and evening to work, without fear of interruption. At lectures I often sat with Strong, and sometimes with Houghton: they were my only acquaintances that year.

Of the four professors to whom I listened Paulsen was the most important, not in himself—he was simply an excellent professor—but important for me as a medium and as a model of judicious and sympathetic criticism. This semester he lectured on Greek Ethics and in the next winter semester on Spinoza. In both subjects he helped to settle my opinions for good. The Greek ethics wonderfully supplied that which was absent in Spinoza, a virile, military, organic view of human life, a civilised view, to keep the cosmic and religious imagination of Spinoza in its proper moral place. The Greeks knew what it was to have a country, a native religion, a beautiful noble way of living, to be defended to the death. They recognised heroically that which Spinoza recognised only descriptively or pietistically: that the power of nature infinitely exceeds and ultimately destroys the power of each of its parts. The Greeks were thereby saved from arrogance without condemning themselves to littleness. For what is greater than beauty, and what is more beautiful than courage to live and to die freely, in one’s chosen way? The Jews, on the contrary, and even Spinoza with them, fell into both littleness and arrogance: into the littleness of being content with anything, with small gains and private safety; and into arrogance in proclaiming that, in their littleness they possessed the highest good, heard the voice of absolute truth, and were the favourites of heaven. Undoubtedly if you renounce everything you are master of everything in an ideal sense, since nothing can disturb you: but the Jews never renounced anything that was within reach; and it was rather the Greek hero who renounced half of what he might have possessed, in order that the other half should be perfect.

I was thus fully settled in my naturalist convictions; they revealed the real background, the true and safe foundation, for human courage, human reason, and human imagination. These might, then, fill the foreground ad libitum with their creations, political and poetic. Both the Greeks and Spinoza, by a spontaneous agreement, combined the two insights that for me were essential: naturalism as to the origin and history of mankind, and fidelity, in moral sentiment, to the inspiration of reason, by which the human mind conceives truth and eternity, and participates in them ideally.

Besides Paulsen I heard Ebbinghaus who even asked me to his house, showed me his first fat baby and talked about William James, of course eulogistically, but with fundamental reservations, as for instance, on the question of freewill and responsibility, on which he said “Das hat er eigentlich nicht durchgedacht.” This seemed rather a scholastic judgment to pass on James. He had thought and thought on that subject, yet he hadn’t thought himself out of his half impulsive, half traditional horror of determinism, not because he couldn’t think the argument out, but because, like Bergson, he didn’t trust argument where he had intuition. Of course Ebbinghaus, whose training was scientific, knew that intuition is not a guide to matters of fact. James, however, was no draught-horse patiently pulling the scientific barge along a placid academic canal; rather a Red Indian shooting the rapids with spasmodic skill and elemental emotions. To Ebbinghaus it seemed that a professor’s business was to trudge along the governmental towpath with a legal cargo, and I agreed with him technically much more than with James; but he was less interesting as a man and less challenging as a thinker.

I don’t know for what reason I heard some lectures and took a seminar of Gezycki’s—doubtless some recommendation from America, because Gezycki, who was a cripple, evoked emotional sympathies in reforming and free religious quarters in the Anglo-Saxon world. He defended English ethics rather than explained them; and his seminar on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason had no historical or critical value, but merely the interest of a pathetic personal cult of human happiness clung to passionately by an unhappy man. He too spoke to me of William James and of William James’s brother-in-law Salter, who was a lecturer for the Ethical Culture Society. He was interested in James on the moral side, yet without spiritualistic leanings; and perhaps I may have learned from Gezycki to see that it is not moral to be romantic. This fact, for Gezycki, refuted romanticism; but for me it merely proves that the afflatus of romanticism belongs to the gnostic religions. It is a vital impulse expressed in fantastic assertions about the world; not (what Gezycki’s heart desired) a social and personal discipline scientifically warranted to increase human happiness and abolish suffering.

For me, at that time, all this was of little account. What counted was Greek ethics, summed up in the stories that Herodotus tells about Solon, explaining the nature of happiness to the benighted Croesus. A string of excited, fugitive, miscellaneous pleasures is not happiness; happiness resides in imaginative reflection and judgment, when the picture of one’s life, or of human life, as it truly has been or is, satisfies the will, and is gladly accepted. Epicurus had a different notion of happiness from that of Solon, but it was just as much a form of wisdom, a choice among possible lives; in neither sage was it a calculus of quantitative pleasures and pains. Epicurus renounced most of the things called pleasures, for the sake of peace, equanimity, and intelligence, and Solon’s heroes renounced life itself for the sake of a beautiful moment or a beautiful death. The extreme of classical heroism here becomes romantic; because the most romantic career, if deliberately chosen and accepted without illusion, would be a form of happiness: something in which a living will recognised its fulfilment and found its peace.

After that first semester the wind was taken out of my sails for study in Germany. Strong and I had gone to England for the holidays; but I stayed at Oxford, and he joined other friends in Paris, neither of us returning to Berlin for the second semester. This was not dereliction on our part: we both had something better to do. Why hadn’t someone warned us not to go to Berlin, but to choose some smaller place where there might be more unity of spirit in the teaching and in student life? Was there no such place at that unlucky moment? Were there no inspired philosophers then in Germany? Was there no enthusiastic romanticism and no Gemütlichkeit? For me it was a source of eternal regret to have missed the enrichment and the lesson that fusion with German life, in my youth, might have given me. Nobody gave me clear advice in the matter, nor did Strong, who needed it less, seem to have received it, or to feel the danger we ran of wasting our time. He gave up the Fellowship for private reasons, and I, to whom it was then assigned, knew of nothing to do but to return to Berlin. All was changed there for me. Instead of keen curiosity and expectation, instead of delight at the freedom of thought and breadth of sympathy shown by my new professors, I was absorbed in other impressions and attachments. I had found England infinitely more interesting and stimulating than Germany. I had been again in Spain, even to Gibraltar, to receive my sister and had left her at my father’s in Avila. I see now that I ought to have made a fresh plunge, a bold decision, gone to Marburg or Jena or Heidelberg or Bonn, seen only Germans, compelled myself to master the language, and lived, as during my first semester, an austere poor student’s life.

At the time, however, I was will-less. Beal persuaded me to go to the pension, kept by an Englishwoman, where he was living, and where everyone was English or American. Mechanically I went again to hear the same professors. Paulsen was lecturing on Spinoza: a great treat, but essentially not a new light. I dropped in to listen to other lecturers occasionally, in their public courses: Wagner on political economy, Lasson on Fichte, Deussen on Schopenhauer and the Indians. I took a course under Simmel on Ten Different Interpretations of the Essence of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason; a clever series of criticisms, producing at least in my mind nothing but amusement and confusion. I was living in Babel. I felt no special inspiration, no guiding purpose, except the engagement involved in holding the Fellowship. Not that inwardly my devotion to philosophy was impaired. It remained my one all-embracing interest, not indeed as a science, only as a balance of mind and temper, in which all the sciences and arts should compose as true a picture as possible of nature and human nature. My quandary was not inward, it didn’t concern my philosophy; it concerned only my academic position and possible career. And from that point of view this German experiment had been a failure. I was wholly incapable of taking a Doctor’s degree in Germany. The only thing for me to do was to return to Harvard and take my Doctor’s degree there, where I was at home and sure of my ground. I knew German enough to write my thesis on a German subject, if I might write it in English. Then, unless a place as teacher were offered me somewhere—I hardly thought of Harvard itself—I could go to the Institute of Technology and study architecture.

I wrote to the Harvard authorities explaining my position, saying I was coming back, and asking to have my Fellowship renewed as for a resident graduate. There was some hesitation about this point, but in the end I got the appointment. It was not materially indispensable to me, as I meant to live at my mother’s in any case, but gave me more leeway. I began that year to save, and to possess a little capital. In other words, I began to prepare for my retirement from teaching before I had begun to teach.

From ten to twenty years later I made several holiday visits to Germany. They were in part acts of contrition for my youthful waste of opportunities, yet I should hardly have made them simply with that idea. The last of these visits I called a Goethe pilgrimage, because I went expressly to Frankfort and to Weimar to visit the home of Goethe’s childhood and that of his old age. I was then preparing my lectures on Three Philosophical Poets of whom Goethe was to be one. Even that, however, would probably not have induced me to revisit Germany had I not meantime formed a real friendship with a young German, Baron Albert von Westenholz.

Westenholz was one of my truest friends. Personal affection and intellectual sympathies were better balanced and fused between him and me than between me and any other person. I made three trips to Hamburg expressly to see him, and he once joined me in London and again at Amsterdam and in Brussels; but travelling ultimately became impracticable for him, on account of his health and hobbies, and I could never persuade him to come to Italy, where we should have found so many themes far enthusiastic discussion. But we carried on a desultory correspondence, and he never lost his interest in my philosophy and in my books. Not that he was in any sense my disciple or surrendered his independence of judgment. His liberal Lutheran background and many-sided studies gave him independent points of view, and his attainments were in many ways wider than mine; so that, for instance, when in the later years I began to read New Testament criticism, chiefly in Loisy, he guided me very usefully to various German authorities on the subject. He always maintained an “Evangelical” conception of Christ very different from mine, which is Gnostic and free from all claims to be historical. He was too dutifully gebildet, too indoctrinated, to be as sceptical as I am; and that difference lent spice to our discussions, especially as he, with his lingering illusions, was the younger man and I, the mentor, was the cynic. When my young friends are “gooder” than I, I respect and love them, but when they are less tender than I towards tradition, I feel that they are uneducated and stupid. I could never accuse Westenholz of being stupid or uneducated: but I felt to the end how German he was, how immersed in learning and inclined to follow a sect, without much capacity for laughter.

His father had been a partner in a family banking-house established in Frankfort and Vienna, originally perhaps Jewish: but my friend’s mother was the daughter of a burgomaster of Hamburg, with the most pronounced Hanseatic Lutheran traditions. The bank had a branch in London, and young Westenholz had served his apprenticeship there and learned to speak English perfectly. But he never entered the firm: his health was far from good: he suffered from various forms of mental or half mental derangement, sleeplessness, and obsessions, which, however, he himself diagnosed with perfect scientific intelligence. By way of a rest-cure, he was sent on long ocean voyages; was wrecked off the coast of Brazil, and later turned up at Harvard where he was brought to see me.

I was then, in 1900-1905, living at No. 60 Brattle Street, and had my walls covered with Arundel prints. These were the starting point for our first warm conversations. I saw at once that he was immensely educated and enthusiastic, and at the same time innocence personified; and he found me sufficiently responsive to his ardent views of history, poetry, religion and politics. He was very respectful, on account of my age and my professorship; and always continued to call me lieber Professor or Professorchen; but he would have made a much better professor than I, being far more assiduous in reading up all sorts of subjects and consulting expert authorities. Before he left Cambridge, it was decided that I should visit him in Hamburg: I was to stay for a night at their town mansion (in an extensive park facing the Alster) to pay my respects to his invalid mother and his sister—a good many years older than he; and then he would carry me off to a little hermitage he had for himself in the woods, absolutely solitary, without even a carriage-road leading up to it.

Hamburg was not an inconvenient place for me to reach, since in those days I often sailed in the Hamburg steamers because they were the first to have single cabins, deep in the centre of the vessel, and well ventilated, so that I could hope to avoid seasickness, and to enjoy privacy. With these things secured, I was glad of a longish voyage, and instead of landing at Cherbourg or Southampton, I could easily go on to Cuxhaven and Hamburg: and the same convenience naturally existed for the return voyage. Our friendship became intellectually closer in later years, without seeming to require personal contacts; and I never went to Germany again after those external conveniences ceased to make the journey easy and as it were optional.

As for him, his impediments were growing upon him. Fear of noise kept him awake, lest some sound should awake him; and he carried great thick curtains in his luggage to hang up on the windows and doors of his hotel bedrooms. At Volksdorf, his country hermitage, the floors were all covered with rubber matting, to deaden the footfalls of possible guests; and he would run down repeatedly, after having gone to bed, to make sure that he had locked the piano; because otherwise a burglar might come in and wake him up by sitting down to play on it! When I suggested that he might get over this absurd idea by simply defying it, and repeating to himself how utterly absurd it was, he admitted that he might succeed in overcoming it; but then he would develop some other obsession instead. It was hopeless: and all his intelligence and all his doctors and psychiatrists were not able to cure him. In his last days, as his friend Reichhardt told me, the great obsession was with bedding: he would spend half the night arranging and rearranging mattresses, pillows, blankets and sheets, for fear that he might not be able to sleep comfortably. And if ever he forgot this terrible problem, his mind would run over the more real and no less haunting difficulties involved in money matters. The curse was not that he lacked money, but that he had it, and must give an account of it to the Government as well as to God. And there were endless complications; for he was legally a Swiss citizen, and had funds in Switzerland, partly declared and partly secret, on which to pay taxes both in Switzerland and in Germany; and for years he had the burden of the house and park in Hamburg, gradually requisitioned by the city government, until finally he got rid of them, and went to live far north, in Holstein, with thoughts of perhaps migrating to Denmark. A nest of difficulties, a swarm of insoluble problems making life hideous, without counting the gnawing worm of religious uncertainty and scientific confusion.

The marvel was that with all these morbid preoccupations filling his days and nights Westenholz retained to the last his speculative freedom. Everything interested him, he could be just and even enthusiastic about impersonal things. I profited by this survival of clearness in his thought: he rejoiced in my philosophy, even if he could not assimilate it or live by it: but the mere idea of such a synthesis delighted him, and my Realm of Truth in particular aroused his intellectual enthusiasm. In his confusion he saw the possibility of clearness, and as his friend Reichhardt said, he became sympathetically hell begeistert, filled with inspired light.

If this cohabitation of profound moral troubles with speculative earnestness was characteristically German, so was the cohabitation of both with childish simplicity. I was told one morning that that day was Fräulein Mathilde’s thirty-third birthday. Where should I go to get some flowers or bon-bons to offer her with my congratulations: embarrassed congratulations, because if she had completed another year of life and that were so much to the good, it was less so that she had already completed thirty-three of them. But no: it was Sunday, and all shops were closed. I was genuinely sorry, because I am naturally remiss at paying compliments and attentions and giving due presents, and when an occasion presents itself boldly, I am glad to be forced to do the right thing. “If you really want to give her a pleasant surprise, write her a birthday poem,” said Westenholz, seeing my perplexity. So I retired for an hour to my room and produced some verses, in which I congratulated the poor, the Baroness, Albert, and their friends on the prospect of having the good Mathilde (for she wasn’t beautiful) with them for another year. The verses were worthless, but they had enough foundation in truth to serve their purpose. Mathilde really was all goodness, as Albert was too, only that he had intellect and madness to complicate the goodness.

In the afternoon, after a solid early dinner at which the Baroness was wheeled in a hospital litter to the table (for she insisted that she was too ill to sit up), brother and sister put their heads together to decide how they should celebrate the occasion; and it was decided that we three should go to their old house in the city, and take the dolls and the doll-furniture out of the boxes, and arrange everything in the dolls’ house just as it used to be. Their old house was that of their maternal grandfather, who had been Burgomaster of Hamburg, belonging now to an uncle who wasn’t living there for the moment. It was in the old town, near one of the churches with a high green steeple, and itself lofty and gabled: but we hurried up many flights of stairs as if treading on forbidden ground: I should have liked to see the rooms, but foresaw difficulties in opening windows and conciliating caretakers that would be involved in a visit of inspection unauthorised by the owner: so that I too hurried guilty-like to the garret, under a vast pitched roof, where evidently we might forget that we were interlopers. The boxes were opened; the dolls, the furniture, the crockery, were all distributed among the rooms of the immense dolls’ house, each precisely where it belonged. The names of the various dolls were recalled, and in rapid German that I wasn’t expected to listen to sundry comic incidents of childhood were referred to and enjoyed for the hundredth time. Then, dutifully, everything was buried again in the boxes, to be resurrected perhaps when Fräulein’s thirty-three years should have become forty-five.

This joy in simplicity, this nostalgia for childishness, in highly educated, rich, and terribly virtuous people surely is thoroughly German: and doesn’t it make some radical fake turn, some organic impediment, in their history? But let me not generalise. Westenholz at any rate was avowedly morbid and abnormal; without being deformed, he had all the pathos and intensity that go with deformity; jealousy and vanity, in professing to judge and to dominate everything from above; great intellectual ardour and display of theory; with genuine delight in the simplest pleasures beneath, and temptation to the crudest vices. It would be a false diagnosis to call him an old child, a pedant whose brain had grown like a pumpkin, and left the heart rudimentary. His heart was not rudimentary, it was large and nobly developed; but the intellectual life accompanying it was not developed out of it but borrowed, foreign, imposed by alien circumstances and traditions; and for this reason, there was relief and joy in reverting from it to homely things. Los von Rom is a very different cry in Germany from what No popery was in England. In England, the King, the prelates and the nobles felt ripe to be their own popes. They wished to graft their culture on their instincts, and their instincts were mature enough to breed a native culture, admirable in those matters that touched English life—the home, the feelings, sports, politics, and manners, trade also and colonial conquests; yet their instincts were crude and incoherent in speculative directions, precisely in proportion as they receded from the manly arts of the native man. But in Germany the expression of the native heart had remained rustic and violent; los von Rom was a disruptive cry, expressing in enthusiasts an anarchistic impulse, and a rebellion against all control; whereas the princes and theologians and learned men who restrained that rebellion, and imposed a strict discipline on the people, imposed something alien and artificial, imposed officialdom, pedantry, or insane vanity. The heart might be free from Rome, but was enslaved to something far poorer and more acrid: so that a return to the heart became a reversion to childhood or to rusticity.