Poems for the Consideration of Our Age

times stood! Public institutions, in both Church and State, the administration—or rather the mismanagement—of learning original: "Wissenschaften," which in this period referred broadly to all organized knowledge or academic disciplines and public affairs, remains in a hundred ways exactly as it was: the very thing that caused him grief from his youth and eventually consumed his heart. Indeed, even the very ferment original: "Gährung" – a metaphor for social, political, or intellectual unrest of his era—does it not bear a striking similarity and equivalence to our own? It is not just that a hundred sects, especially the Rosicrucians Rosicrucians: a secretive, spiritual movement of the 17th century that sought a universal reformation of mankind; Andreä is famously associated with their founding documents, though his true involvement remains a subject of debate, were active then (and Andreä's relationship with the latter was such that I have encountered almost none of his writings in which he did not mention them—whether with hope, mockery, or warning): it is not only these fermenting sects themselves, but also the invisible hand that guided them then, which belong both to his time and to our