answering every stroke with always purer and higher tones. But this declares only the pathetic element radiating from his figure, and not the intellectual. But quite aside from everything which makes him a touching, poetic figure, or a mystical one if you will, he possessed great intellectual potency. Driven by a relentless but genuinely German destiny to retire within himself, he made himself a world from within. Yet it was not at all—as with the romantics living after him—a world of the fleeting and music-like dream; it was a world of crystalline vision in which all the spiritual, moral, and historical forces of reality had their place, although not viewed coldly through the understanding, but with a mythopoeic or religious eye. The more pitilessly and confusingly the real world encircled him, the more powerfully his soul struggled to construct within itself a vision embracing all the forces in the world and reconciling them with one another. As I try to describe for Anglo-American readers of The Dial the aspect of this mighty supernatural presence, the name of William Blake comes spontaneously to my mind; and in fact an analogy does exist for those who look more closely at the phenomena of the spirit. In any case, abandoning himself to a pure and demoniacally powerful intuition, Hölderlin perfected within himself a synthesis of the great historical past on which our intellectual existence rests; and in this synthesis he produced the solemn union of the two great tendencies which I designated above as the religious complexes in the consciousness of this last living generation. He grasped Hellenism with his whole soul; but precisely because he grasped it completely and lived in it, towards the end of his life he also moved through an evolution which transpired in Hellenism itself—if we see, glimmering through Plato, a light which is identical with that of Christianity. He grasped this youthful and still undogmatized spirit of Christianity without, one might say, completely abandoning the spirit of Hellenism. The great pagan conceptions of fate and the gods live in his poetic world along with deeply Christian attitudes and intuitions—Aether and Bacchus with Christ. So the generation of the living sees its deepest yearning, the germ of its new religious dream, pre-existing in this mystic leader. His star shines over their spiritual world; and for the moment, as the stars will it, this figure is nearer to the heart and affects the heart more powerfully, than even the powerful and ever comforting vision of Goethe.
