ABSTRACT
It is hardly possible to over-estimate the significance of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) in the emergence and the historical course of German Romanticism. Almost wherever one turns, one finds that what is brought to fruition by the Romantic literati of the early nineteenth century - the cults of creative genius, of nature, of Volkslied, of the German medieval heritage, of oriental religions and cultures, of comparative civilizational studies and universal, absolute faiths - has been sownby Herder in anhistorico-philosophical treatise, an occasional essay, or a casual fragment. Both in the nature of his personality and in the spirit of his aspirations he is one of the most completely German of all figures of influence in modern German literature and thought. Without him nineteenth-century intellectual and literary life would have taken a very different course-and some of the events in that life might never have happened.
