But it is not only the excesses peculiar to the Romanticists which Arnim reprehends; he also sharply and wittily castigates the anti-Romanticist, Jens Baggesen. In Heidelberg, where he must have met Arnim, Baggesen had written a series of satirical sonnets directed against the Romanticists, "literary sansculottes on the German Parnassus," as he called them. These he published in the same year that _Dolores_ appeared, under the title, _Der Karfunkel- oder Klingklingel-Almanack, ein Taschenbuch für vollendete Romantiker und angehende Mystiker auf das Jahr der Gnade_ 1810. It was, however, undoubtedly less Baggesen's verses than his extraordinary instability of character which provoked Arnim's satire. The life of this enemy of Romanticism was more planless and capricious than the life of any one of the Romanticists; and Arnim, for whom everything strange and improbable had an attraction, could not fail to be interested in such a singular personality. In _Dolores_ he caricatures him wittily and mercilessly in the person of the poet "Waller." But though, in this instance, the weaknesses of a special individual are caricatured, Arnim's general purpose unmistakably is to throw into salient relief characteristics which exemplify the lawlessness and levity of the emotional life of a whole generation.
His unfinished historical novel, _Die Kronenwächter_ ("The Guardians of the Crown"), published in 1817, presents us, like _Dolores_, with several well-conceived and ably elaborated characters along with a mass of undigested mystic and lyric material. In the background of this tale looms a huge, mysterious, enchanted castle, the seven towers of which are absolutely transparent; they appear to be built of glass, for each of them projects a brilliant rainbow upon black rocks and upon distant water. In this castle the guardians of the crown of the Hohenstaufens have their lonely retreat, and hence they sally forth into the world, to act and to avenge. But it is not this mystical background which is of importance. What one really remembers are one or two characters portrayed with such virile force as probably no German author has exhibited since, unless it be Gottfried Keller, in his historical novels.