The general trend of German thought had inclined towards the _Everlasting Nay_, until Napoleon flashed across its ken.
For a time he won the admiration of the chief thinkers of Germany by brushing away the feudal cobwebs from her fair face.

He seemed about to call her sons to a life of public activity; and in the famous soliloquy of Faust, in which he feels his way from word to thought, from thought to might, and from might to action, we may discern the literary projection of the influence exerted by the new Charlemagne on that nation of dreamers.[237] But the promise was fulfilled only in the most harshly practical way, namely, by cutting off all supplies of tobacco and coffee; and when Teufelsdroeckh himself, admirer though he was of the French Revolution, found that the summons for his favourite beverage--the "dear melancholy coffee, that begets fancies," of Lessing--produced only a muddy decoction of acorns, there was the risk of his tendencies earthwards taking a very practically revolutionary turn.
In truth, the German universities were the leaders of the national reaction against the Emperor of the West.

Fichte's pleading for a truly national education had taken effect.

Elementary instruction was now being organized in Prussia; and the divorce of thought from action, which had so long sterilized German life, was ended by the foundation of the University of Berlin by Humboldt.

Thus, in 1810, the year of Prussia's deepest woe, when her brave Queen died of a stricken heart, when French soldiers and _douaniers_ were seizing and burning colonial wares, her thinkers came into closer touch with her men of action, with mutually helpful results.