Poems for the Consideration of Our Age

into account, since you mention your author’s innocence regarding Rosicrucianism original: "Rosenkreuzerei"; the secretive, mystical movement of the early 17th century which many believed Andreä founded or influenced. My opinion, which I expressed incidentally in the Teutscher Merkur The German Mercury, a highly influential literary journal edited by Christoph Martin Wieland (March 1782) only as far as the occasion required, has met with a double contradiction in the Wirtemberg Repertory referring to the Wirtembergisches Repertorium für die Litteratur, a scholarly journal of the period, which seems to cancel itself out in such a way that my opinion remains standing in the middle. The praiseworthy author of the biography of our Andreä believes that I do not grant him enough of a share in this association; the author of a new explanation of the history of the Rosicrucians *) claims, on the contrary, that I and others have granted him far too much,

*) Wirtemberg Repertory, p. 512 et seq.