In that pure and happy field of the golden age, in that paradise of innocence, he dwelt longer than others.  The house where he was born, in which a cultivated clergyman ruled as father; the ancient, linden-embowered monastery of Bergen on the Elbe, where a pious teacher kept up his patriarchal activity; Tuebingen, still monastic in its essential form; those simple Swiss dwellings about which the brooks murmured, which the lakes laved, and which the cliffs surrounded—­everywhere he found another Delphi, everywhere the groves in which as a mature and cultivated youth he continued to revel even yet.  There he was powerfully attracted by the monuments of the manly innocence of the Greeks which have been left us.  Cyrus, Araspes, Panthea, and forms of equal loftiness revived in him; he felt the spirit of Plato weaving within him; he felt that he needed that spirit to reproduce those pictures for himself and for others—­so much the more since he desired not so keenly to evoke poetic phantoms as, rather, to create a moral influence for actual beings.

Yet the very fact that he had the good fortune to dwell so protractedly in these loftier realms, and that he could long regard as the most perfect verity all that he thought, felt, imagined, dreamed, and fancied—­this very fact embittered for him the fruit which he was obliged at last to pluck from the tree of knowledge.

Who can escape the conflict with the outer world?  Even our friend is drawn into this strife; reluctantly he submits to contradiction by experience and by life; and since, after a long struggle, he succeeds not in uniting these august figures with those of the vulgar world, or that high desire with the demands of the day, he resolves to let the actual pass current as the necessary, and declares that what has thus far seemed real to him is phantasy.

Yet even here the individuality and the energy of his spirit reveals itself to be worthy of admiration.  Despite all the fulness of his life, despite so strong a joy of living, despite noble inward talents and honorable spiritual desires and purposes, he feels himself wounded by the world and defrauded of his greatest treasures.  Henceforth he can in experience nowhere find what had constituted his joy for so many years, and what had even been the inmost content of his life; yet he does not consume himself in idle lamentations, of which we know so many in the prose and verse of others, but he resolves upon counter-action.  He proclaims war on all that cannot be demonstrated in reality; first and foremost, therefore, on Platonic love, then on all dogmatizing philosophy, especially its two extremes of Stoicism and Pythagoreanism.  Furthermore, he works implacably against religious fanaticism, and against all that to reason appears eccentric.

But he is at once overwhelmed with anxiety lest he go too far, lest he himself act fantastically, and now he simultaneously begins battle against commonplace reality.  He opposes everything which we are accustomed to understand under the name Philistinism—­musty pedantry, provincialism, petty etiquette, narrow criticism, false prudery, smug complacency, arrogant dignity, and whatever names may be applied to all these unclean spirits, whose name is Legion.