 First, the romantics’ focus on and praise for rational and autonomous criticism is continuous with the Enlightenment’s commitment to the value of rational criticism. Admiring Goetthold Ephraim Lessing’s ideal of criticism and his devotion to independent thinking, Friedrich Schlegel writes, “critique is the common pillar on which the entire edifice of knowledge and language rests” (Critique: 271). Rather than discontinuing the Enlightenment’s call to submit every belief and every action to the authority of rational criticism, the romantics are responsible for continuing “the age of criticism”—which is usually taken to characterize the eighteenth century—well into the nineteenth century. In that sense, they are the “children” of the Enlightenment.