First Affections

William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood:

         [...] High instincts before which our mortal Nature
                Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised:
                      But for those first affections,
                      Those shadowy recollections,
                Which, be they what they may
                Are yet the fountain-light of all our day,
                Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;
                    Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
                Our noisy years seem moments in the being
                Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
                    To perish never;
                Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
                      Nor Man nor Boy,
                Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
                Can utterly abolish or destroy! [...]
                    Though nothing can bring back the hour
                Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
                      We will grieve not, rather find
                      Strength in what remains behind;
                      In the primal sympathy
                      Which having been must ever be;
                      In the soothing thoughts that spring
                      Out of human suffering;
                      In the faith that looks through death, [...]
                Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
                Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
                To me the meanest flower that blows can give
                Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

The Quintessential In Romanticism

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, IV., p. 68:

The great question of the relation of poetry to life, despair over the deep, bitter discord between them, the unwearied struggle to bring about a reconciliation—this is what lies at the foundation of the whole of German literature from the Sturm und Drang period to the death of Romanticism.

Fichte, The Romantics, And Imagination

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, pp. 39-40:

Fichte's doctrine of a world-positing, world-creating Ego was at variance with “sound human reason.” This was one of its chief recommendations in the eyes of the Romanticists. The Wissenschaftslehre was scientific paradox, but to them paradox was the fine flower of thought. Moreover, the fundamental idea of the doctrine was as radical as it was paradoxical. It had been evolved under the impression of the attempt made by the French Revolution to transform the whole traditional social system into a rational system (Vernunftstaat). The autocracy of the Ego was Fichte's conception of the order of the world, and therefore in this doctrine of the Ego the Romanticists believed that they possessed the lever with which they could lift the old world from its hinges.1

The Romantic worship of imagination had already begun with Fichte. He explained the world as the result of an unconscious, yet to a thinker comprehensible, act of the free, yet at the same time limited, Ego. This act, he maintains, emanates from the creative imagination. By means of it the world which we apprehend with the senses first becomes to us a real world. The whole activity of the human mind, then, according to Fichte, springs from the creative imagination; it is the instinct which he regards as the central force of the active Ego. The analogy with the imaginative power which is so mighty in art is evident. But what Fichte himself failed to perceive is, that imagination is by no means a creative, but only a transforming, remodelling power, since what it acts upon is only the form of the things conceived of, not their substance.

1. Somewhat germane lines are found here: Abusing Philosophy

Romantic Hospital Of Germany

Georg Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (New York, 1902), vol. II., The Romantic School in Germany, Intro., pp. 9-10:

What a contrast is presented by the overstrained, extravagant personalities peopling the Romantic hospital of Germany! A phthisical Moravian Brother with the consumptive's sensuality and the consumptive's mystic yearnings—Novalis. A satirical hypochondriac, subject to hallucinations and with morbid leanings to Catholicism—Tieck. A genius, impotent to produce, but with the propensity of genius to revolt and the imperative craving of impotence to subject itself to outward authority—Friedrich Schlegel. A dissipated fantast with the half-insane imagination of the drunkard—Hoffmann. A foolish mystic like Werner, and a genius like the suicide Kleist. Think of Hoffmann, and his pupil, Hans Andersen, and observe how sane, but also how sober and subdued, Andersen appears compared with his first master.