Now that stroke of the
_hohe Pilze_, the great funguses, would have been impossible to the tact
and delicacy of a born lover of nature like the Celt; and could only
have come from a German who has _hineinstudirt_ himself into natural
magic. It is a crying false note, which carries us at once out of the
world of nature-magic, and the breath of the woods, into the world of
theatre-magic and the smell of gas and orange-peel.[Arnold.]
~Johann Ludwig Tieck~ (1773-1853) was one of the most prominent of the
German romanticists. He was especially felicitous in the rehandling of
the old German fairy tales. The passage quoted above is from Heine's
_Germany_, Part II, book II, chap. II. The following is the translation
of C.G. Leland, slightly altered: "In these compositions we feel a
mysterious depth of meaning, a marvellous union with nature, especially
with the realm of plants and stones. The reader seems to be in an
enchanted forest; he hears subterranean springs and streams rustling
melodiously and his own name whispered by the trees.
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