It is on account of this contrast that we should find a reason for repeating the general thesis in connection with the Ideal, to the effect that the _Idyllic_ is exceptionally adapted for its expression, inasmuch as where that is presented the cleavage between what is determined by legal necessity and the living person is wholly absent. To this we must reply that, however simple and original idyllic situations may be, however far removed they may be from the artificial prose-existence of society, such simplicity, if we consider the nature of its content, has, in fact, too insignificant an interest to satisfy the most substantial and essential requirements of the Ideal. Material of this sort fails entirely to include the most weighty motives of heroic character such as Fatherland, moral and family problems, and their development; it is a kind of treatment which is apt to select as the very core of its subject such a fact as the loss of a single sheep or the falling in love of a girl. In this way the Idyllic not unfrequently becomes merely the resource and recreation of our hearts, to which poets such as Gessner, for example, will add their dose of sickly sweetness and sentimentalism. The idyllic aspect of the days we live in have, further, this defect, that this _naïveté_, this domesticated or rural atmosphere in the emotional aspect of love or the enjoyment of a good cup of coffee in the open and things of that sort are not likely to awake much interest, when we find in them nothing but the country parson flavour--find them cut off, that is to say, from all wider relations with the outside world, and not a trace of the profounder web of purposes with which that world is interwoven. It is precisely here that we have reason to admire the genius of Goethe, when he concentrated his poetic talent on material of this kind in his poem of "Hermann and Dorothea." It is true that he selects from the life of the Present a particular theme of very limited extension, but at the same time he unfolds before us as the background and atmosphere of the picture in which his characters are portrayed the great interests of the revolution and his own native country, and, in short, associates with a subject-matter necessarily narrow in its range facts of world-history of the widest and most potent significance.