United States or Israel ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Still greater rascalities were carried on on the right bank of the Rhine. Gauthier robbed from Coblentz down to the Prussian frontiers." These allegations are confirmed by Goerres in a pamphlet, "Results of my Mission to Paris," in which he says, "The Directory had treated the four departments like so many Paschalics, which it abandoned to its Janissaries and colonized with its favorites.
On the 18th of October, 1817, the students of Jena, Halle, and Leipzig, and those of some of the more distant universities, assembled in order to solemnize the jubilee on the three hundredth anniversary of the Reformation, on the Wartburg, where, in imitation of Luther, they committed a number of servile works, inimical to the German cause, to the flames, as Goerres at that time said, "filled with anger that the same reformation required of the church by Luther should be sanctioned, but at the same time refused, by the state."
The Rhenish provinces were instantly occupied by Prussian troops and placed under the patriotic administration of Justus Gruner, who was joined by Goerres of Coblentz, whose Rhenish Mercury so powerfully influenced public opinion that Napoleon termed him the fifth great European power. The Dutch revolted and took the few French still remaining in the country prisoner.
Among the other Rhenish Germans of distinction, who had at that time formed a connection with France, Joseph Goerres brought himself, notwithstanding his extreme youth, into great note at Coblentz by his superior talents. He also speedily discovered the immense mistake made by the Germans in resting their hopes upon France.
I am to visit Goerres this evening.... There is an English service here very decently and nicely performed by Mr. de Coetlogon, a man in Scotch orders, and the chapel is a modest but respectable room.... I ask hard questions upon marriage, and receive very doubtful answers; but I am resolved, if possible, to get some definite information from the best sources in Germany.
He began to restore some of the monasteries, and several professors inclined to Ultramontanism and to Catholic mysticism, the most distinguished among whom was Goerres, the Prussian exile, assembled at the new university at Munich. Here and there appeared a pious enthusiast.
Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim, Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet: he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself the power of modern ideas.
Stowe has just been wading through eight volumes of "La Mystique," by Goerres, professor for forty years past in the University of Munich, first of physiology and latterly of philosophy. He examines the whole cycle of abnormal psychic, spiritual facts, trances, ecstasy, clairvoyance, witchcraft, spiritualism, etc., etc., as shown in the Romish miracles and the history of Europe.
On Goerres's repeated demand for the reannexation of Alsace and Lorraine, of which Germany had been so unwarrantably deprived, the Austrian Observer declared in the beginning of 1816, "who would believe that Goerres would lend his pen to such miserable arguments. Alsace and Lorraine are guaranteed to France. To demand their restoration would be contrary to every notion of honor and justice."
However, if the immortal Goerres and the German mystics have had their day, there is the immortal Goethe, and the Pantheists; and I incline to think that the fashion has set very strongly in their favor.
Word Of The Day