Add that this class is rapidly increasing by the
infatuation of the active class, who, whilst they regard these young
Athenians with suspicion and dislike, educate their own children in
the same courses, and use all possible endeavors to secure to them
the same result.
Certainly we are not insensible to this calamity, as described
by the observers or witnessed by ourselves. It is not quite new and
peculiar, though we should not know where to find in literature any
record of so much unbalanced intellectuality; such undeniable
apprehension without talent, so much power without equal
applicability, as our young men pretend to. Yet in Theodore Mundt's
(* 1) account of Frederic Holderlin's "Hyperion," we were not a
little struck with the following Jeremiad of the despair of Germany,
whose tone is still so familiar, that we were somewhat mortified to
find that it was written in 1799.
(* 1) Geschichte der Literatur der Gegenwart. 1842. p. 86.
"Then came I to the Germans. I cannot conceive of a people
more disjoined than the Germans. Mechanics you shall see, but no
man; priests, but no man; thinkers, but no man.
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