In his Stances à Madame Lullin Voltaire is at least as poetical and nearer to normal experience:
Quel mortel s’est jamais flatté
D’un rendez-vous à l’agonie?
[170] See especially Lyceum fragment, no. 108.
[171] A well-known example of the extreme to which the romanticists pushed their Fichtean solipsism is the following from the William Lovell of the youthful Tieck: “Having gladly escaped from anxious fetters, I now advance boldly through life, absolved from those irksome duties which were the inventions of cowardly fools. Virtue is, only because I am; it is but a reflection of my inner self. What care I for forms whose dim lustre I have myself brought forth? Let vice and virtue wed. They are only shadows in the mist,” etc.
[172] Beyond Good and Evil, ch. IV.
[173] On Contemporary Literature, 206. The whole passage is excellent.
[174] M. Legouis makes a similar remark in the Cambridge History of English Literature XI, 108.
[175] I scarcely need say that Wordsworth is at times genuinely ethical, but he is even more frequently only didactic. The Excursion, as M. Legouis says, is a “long sermon against pessimism.”
[176] “Quia fecisti nos ad te et inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te.”