“ The offer was accepted; on his way to the Danish capital Klopstock met at Hamburg the lady who in 1754 became his wife, Margareta (Meta) Moller, (the “Cidli” of his odes) , an enthusiastic admirer of his poetry. His happiness was short; she died in 1758, leaving him almost broken-hearted. His grief at her loss finds pathetic expression in the 15th canto of the Messias. The poet subsequently published his wife’s writings, Hinterlassene Werke von Margareta Klopstock (1759) , which give evidence of a tender, sensitive and deeply religious spirit. Klopstock now relapsed into melancholy ”

“ KLOPSTOCK, GOTTLIEB FRIEDRICH (1724–1803) , German poet, was born at Quedlinburg, on the 2nd of July 1724, the eldest son of a lawyer, a man of sterling character and of a deeply religious mind. Both in his birthplace and on the estate of Friedeburg on the Saale, which his father later rented, young Klopstock passed a happy childhood; and more attention having been given to his physical than to his mental development he grew up a strong healthy boy and was an excellent horseman and skater. ”

“ The personality of Christ could scarcely be treated in an individual form, still less could angels and devils—and in the case of God Himself it was impossible. The result was that, despite the groundwork—the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Revelation of St John, and the model ready to hand in Milton’s Paradise Lost—material elements are largely wanting and the actors in the poem, Divine and human, lack plastic form. ”