Above are the divine
poet's larks and daisies, his incommunicable skies, his broad prospects
of life and nature; and meanwhile our Teutonic _teredo_ worms his way
below, and offers to be our guide into an obscurity of his own
contriving. The reaction of language upon style, and even upon thought,
by its limitations on the one hand, and its suggestions on the other, is
so apparent to any one who has made even a slight study of comparative
literature, that we have sometimes thought the German tongue at least an
accessory before the fact, if nothing more, in the offences of German
literature. The language has such a fatal genius for going
stern-foremost, for yawing, and for not minding the helm without some ten
minutes' notice in advance, that he must be a great sailor indeed who can
safely make it the vehicle for anything but imperishable commodities.
Vischer's _Aesthetik_, the best treatise on the subject, ancient or
modern, is such a book as none but a German could write, and it is
written as none but a German could have written it. The abstracts of its
sections are sometimes nearly as long as the sections themselves, and it
is as hard to make out which head belongs to which tail, as in a knot of
snakes thawing themselves into sluggish individuality under a spring sun.
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