Saint-Petersbourg, leaves nothing to be desired in the matter of plain speaking. The executioner is a "sublime being," "the corner-stone of society;" along with him "all social order disappears." According to De Maistre's theory, two powers are required to quell the rebellious spirits—the spirit of unbelief and the spirit of disobedience—let loose by the French Revolution, and these two are the Pope and the executioner. The Pope and the executioner are the two main props of society; the one crushes the revolutionary thought with his bull, the other cuts off the revolutionary head with his axe. It is a pleasure to read such argument. Here we have vigour and determination, effectual expression of a clear thought, energetic and undisguised reaction. And De Maistre is the same in everything. He is not, like Danish reactionaries who call themselves Liberals, reactionary in social matters and religion, and liberal or half-liberal in politics. He loathes political liberty; he jeers (in his letters) at the emancipation of women; in a special essay he deliberately and warmly defends the Spanish Inquisition; and in all trueheartedness and manly seriousness he desires the reinstitution of the auto-da-fé, and is not ashamed to say it, seeing that he thinks it. Look well at such a man as this—gifted and eminent, great as a statesman, great as an author, who sacrifices his whole fortune sooner than make the least concession to the Revolution, which he abhors, or to Napoleon, whom he detests; who frankly adores the executioner as the indispensable upholder of order; who gives the gallows the most important place in his statute-book, and counsels the Church to have recourse to the axe and the faggot—there is a figure worthy of note; a proud, bold countenance, which expresses an unmistakable mental bent, and which one does not forget. This is a type one takes pleasure in, as the naturalist takes pleasure in a fine specimen of a species of which he has hitherto only met with imperfect and unsatisfactory examples. Looking at the matter from a practical point of view, it may be considered fortunate that such personalities are not to be found in Danish literature, but their absence gives a less plastic character to its history.

It is all very well to say that we Danes only assimilated the good and healthy elements of German Romanticism. When we see how the German Romanticists end, we comprehend that from the very beginning there was concealed in Romanticism a reactionary principle which prescribed the course—the curve—of their careers.

Friedrich Schlegel, the author of Lucinde, the free-thinking admirer of Fichte, who, in his Versuch über den Begriff des Republikanismus (Essay on the Idea of Republicanism), called the democratic republic, with female suffrage, the only reasonable form of government, is converted to Catholicism, becomes a mystic and a faithful servant of the Church, and in his later writings endeavours to promote the cause of reactionary absolutism. Novalis and Schleiermacher, who in their early writings display a mixture of pantheism and pietism, of Spinoza and Zinzendorf, steadily drift away from Spinoza and approach orthodoxy. In his later life Schleiermacher recants those Letters on Lucinde which he had written in a spirit of the purest youthful enthusiasm. Novalis, who in his youthful letters declares himself "prepared for any sort of enlightenment," and hopes that he may live to see "a new massacre of St. Bartholemew, a wholesale destruction of despotisms and prisons," who desires a republic, and who, at the time when Fichte is prosecuted for atheism, remarks, "Brave Fichte is really fighting for us all,"—this same Novalis ends by looking on the king in the light of an earthly Providence, condemning Protestantism as revolutionary, defending the temporal power of the Pope, and extolling the spirit of Jesuitism. Fouqué, the knight without fear and without reproach, becomes in the end a pietist Don Quixote, whose great desire is a return to the conditions of feudalism. Clemens Brentano, in his youth the most mettlesome of poets, who both in life and literature made war upon every species of convention, becomes the credulous secretary of a nun, a hysterical visionary; does nothing for the space of five years but fill volume after volume with the sayings of Anna Katharina Emmerich. Zacharias Werner is a variant of the same Romantic type. He starts in his career as a friend of "enlightenment"; but soon a process of moral dissolution begins; he first extols Luther, then turns Roman Catholic and recants his eulogy; in the end he becomes a priest, and as such displays, both in his life and in his sentimentally gross writings and sermons, a combination of coarse sensuality and priestly unction.

And Steffens—he who stormed the heaven of German Romanticism, carried the sacred fire to Denmark, and set men's minds in such violent uproar that he was compelled to leave his country—what of him? what was he? An upright, weak character, with a brain charged with confused enthusiasms; all feeling and imitative fancy; no lucidity of thought or pregnant concision of style. It is literally impossible to read the so-called scientific writings of his later period; one runs the risk of being drowned in watery sentimentality or smothered by ennui. "When," says Julian Schmidt, "he expounded the Naturphilosophie in his broken German from the professorial chair, his mathematical calculations came out wrong and his experiments failed, but his audience was carried away by his earnestness, his almost religious solemnity, his naïve, child-like enthusiasm." Naïveté was a quality that the Northerner of those days seldom lacked. In his best days, Steffens, captivated by the theories of the Naturphilosophie, took an innocent pleasure in tracing the attributes of the human mind in minerals, in humanising geology and botany. But the Revolution of July turned his head. Inflamed by pietism, that elderly lady who for the last thirteen years had been the object of his affections, and for whose sake he had already more than once entered the lists, he closed his literary career with a series of feeble attacks upon the young writers of post-revolutionary Germany.

In this he was only following in the footsteps of his master, Schelling. Schelling, who, in marked contrast to Fichte with his clear doctrine of the Ego, dwells upon the mysterious nature of the mind, and bases not only philosophy, but also art and religion, upon the perception of genius, the so-called "intellectual intuition," displays both in his doctrine and in his want of method the arbitrariness, the lawlessness, which is the kernel of Romanticism. As early as 1802, in his Bruno, he used the significant expression and future catchword, "Christian philosophy," though he still maintained that, in genuine religious value, the Bible is not to be compared with the sacred books of India—a theory which even Görres champions in the early stage of his literary career. Having, like Novalis, at Tieck's instigation, made a close study of Jakob Böhme and the other mystics, Schelling began to philosophise mystically on the subject of "Nature in God," an expression appropriated by Martensen in his Spekulative Dogmatik. But when, shortly afterwards, a patent of nobility was conferred on him (as professor at the University of Munich), and he was made President of the Academy of Science in Catholic and clerical Bavaria, the famous "Philosophy of Revelation" (Offenbarungsphilosophie) commenced to germinate in his mind. Soon the transformation was complete; the fiery enthusiast had become a courtier, the prophet a charlatan. With his mysteries, his announcements of a marvellous science, "which had hitherto been considered impossible," his refusal to print his wisdom, to do anything but communicate it verbally, and even then not in its entirety, he qualified himself for being called, after Hegel's death, to Berlin, to lend a helping hand to State religion in the "Christian-Germanic" police-governed Prussia of the day, and to