"And when Friedrich [Schlegel] lent him his presentation copy of Schleiermacher's Discourses he read the first two or three with eager admiration of their breadth of culture, but 'the more negligent the style became, and the more Christian the religion, the more this effect changed into its opposite, and finally the whole thing ended in wholesome and cheerful antipathy'. During the summer [1799] he had read Milton's Paradise Lost in the Weimar Park, perhaps seeking guidance for his own attempt in Faust to turn Christian theology to poetic effect, but, though he conceived a considerable respect for Milton, the subject of his epic, for all its advantages of an easy appeal to the faithful, remained in his view 'worm-eaten and hollow within'....If Milton could not help him, Schleiermacher certainly could not either."
-- Goethe: The Poet and the Age: Volume II: Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, Nicolas Boyle, 2000, p. 643.
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