Excerpt from The International Library of Famous Literature, Vol. 4 of 20: Selections From the World's Great Writers, Ancient, Medieval, and Modern, With Biographical and Explanatory Notes and Critical Essays by Many Eminent Writers
At the' bottom of the German heart there is a good deal of senti mentality: This feeling, which makes us so fond of singing and music, of intimate family life and cheerful conviviality, has given to our literature a peculiar flavour, a popular turn, an inclination to what moves the soul of the peasant and the labourer - sometimes indeed, at the cost of realistic incident or refined form. But out of this prevailing level of literary cottage-life there rises from time to time a bold fabric of intellect, aspiring to the mystical and the metaphysical. In the act of rearing such a structure the German mind has been used to exert all its original power, and then to abandon itself for a while to rest or distraction. In consequence we have had, in the course of centuries, several striking Bluthe perioden, but not that almost unbroken continuity of fine literature that England has enjoyed from the time of Chaucer to the present day.
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