THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
burg Mar. 14, 1803. He was descended from a family which for three generations had attained a fair measure of distinction in the law and the government service. When Friedrich was nine years old his father removed to Friedeburg in i. Early the county of Mansfeld where the Life and boy revealed even then that profound Studies, love for nature which was to find expression in his poetry. At the age of thirteen he returned to Quedlinburg and began his studies at the gymnasium, with little enthusiasm and success, however. A free scholarship enabled him to enter, in 1739, the Schulpforte, the ancient Schola Portensis founded by the Elector Maurice of Saxony for the education of Protestant youth. This was the time of the great struggle between the classicists and the romanticists, between Gottsched and Bodmer, and young Klopstock fell easily under the sway of the " revolutionary " ideas of the Swiss school. It was in 1737 that Gottsched opened the conflict by his attack on Milton's Paradise Lost and Bodmer replied in the celebrated Vom Wunderbaren in der Poesie (1740) which Klopstock took as his guide in the study of the epic, going at the same time to Homer and Vergil for his models. For a time he was possessed with the desire of celebrating in epic form, the deeds of Henry the Fowler, liberator of Germany from the Hungarians, but it came to him after many sleepless nights that the Messiah was the worthiest subject for the pen of an epic writer, and the youthful poet then entered upon his life's task which was to take twenty-five years in the completion. He graduated from the Schulpforte in 1745, delivering a valedictory address which must be regarded as marking, with the work of Bodmer already mentioned, the opening of a new era in the history of German literature. Abandoning the standards of the spiritless verse-literature of the modern classicists, Klopstock sounded an appeal for a national epic in the spirit of the great epics of the ancient world. He called for a German epic literature without knowing that such a treasure of national lore was in existence. At a time when Vergil was generally set above Homer because the one was " refined " and the other " rude " the youthful Klopstock dared to reverse the order and to proclaim the Greek singer as the prince of poets.
In the autumn of 1745 Klopstock began the study of theology at Jena; but his disgust was speedily aroused by the rudeness of student life there, and in the spring of the following year he removed to Leipsic. Before his departure, however, he had written the first three cantos of the 2. Studies Messias, in prose form. At Leipsic he at Leipsic. came into intimate association with Earlier Gartner, Andreas Cramer, A. Schlegel, Poetic Rabener, Zacharia, Giseke, and Ebert, Work. who, with others, formed a poetic circle whose productions were published in the Bremer Beitrdge edited by Gartner. Here in an atmosphere of culture and personal affection, Klopstock began the composition of odes on the Horatian mode'. From the year 1747 date the Lehrling der Griechen, Wingolf Die Kiln/tig Geliebte, and from the following year, Selmar und Selma, An
Ebert, An Giseke, Petrarca und Laura, and others. In 1746 he had selected the hexameter as the most suitable form for his epic, and after laboring for nearly two years on the recasting of his prose material into verse published the first three cantos of the Messias in the Bremer Beitrdge in 1748. The effect produced on the popular mind was tremendous; in the national literature they opened a new line of development. Above the musical and empty verse jingle of the time the opening songs of the Messias towered incomparable, with their fervid religiosity and poetic fire cast in noble Homeric phrase forms. As Kleist said, so lofty and rich a style had been deemed impossible in Germany. Less enthusiastic natures were carried away by the exalted piety which now found expression in such full-mouthed utterance. In spite of much that was personal in the Messias, much that was historically and critically unwarranted, no one could deny its author the gift of poetic, soulstirring, Christian inspiration.
In 1748 Klopstock left Leipsic and took up the post of tutor in the house of a relative at Langensalza, where his duties gave him ample leisure for the pursuit of his poetic works. At the same time he was at work on the fourth and fifth cantos of the Messias; happy, it may be presumed, in the enjoyment of a vast popularity. Hos- 3. Life and tile critics, however, were not wanting; Works the orthodox clergy assailed his " bold after 1748. fictions," while the followers of Gottsched found fault with the technique of the poem and the excessive sentimentality that characterizes it in parts. In the spring of 1750 Klopstock returned to Quedlinburg, but went soon after to Switzerland, where his Messias had achieved its greatest triumph. He remained in Zurich till the spring of 1751 when he went to Copenhagen at the invitation of Frederick V whose minister, Bernstorff, was one of his warmest admirers. The recipient of a liberal pension, he could now devote himself to the completion of his great poem. In 1754 he married Margareta Moller, whom, three years earlier, he had met in Hamburg, and had subsequently sung under the name of Cidli, and with whom he lived happily till her death in 1758. From this period date many odes and the plays, Der Tod Adams (1757), Salomo (1764), and Die Hermannsschlacht (1769), the latter revealing his complete lack of the dramatic sense and all contributing, by their unrestrained sentimentality, to the deterioration of dramatic standards in Germany. Frederick V. died in 1766; Count Bernstorff soon after fell from power, and, retiring in 1770 to Hamburg, was followed by Klopstock who passed the remainder of his life in that city with the exception of the years 1774 and 1775, when the Margrave Charles Frederick of Baden summoned him to Carlsruhe. There, in spite of honors conferred upon him, the poet found conditions little to his taste. It was on his return to Hamburg that he met Goethe, but the acquaintance then formed soon came to an end. In 1774 there appeared Die Gclehrtenrepublik containing Klopstock's opinion on literary questions, conditions, and personalities of the times as well as his investigations in the history of the German