23. What is Schlegel’s sense of the word? Perhaps he had in mind the famous aphorism attributed to the Greek poet Archilochus, whose work Schlegel elsewhere cites: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Isaiah Berlin’s The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953; rev. 1978) opens with a probing meditation on “these dark words” whose authenticity and meaning (to say nothing of a sensible translation) remains unclear. It is, however, their figurative suggestiveness that inspires Berlin.
   Charles Rosen, taking the hedgehog as a purely natural conceit, examines the Schlegel fragment in The Romantic Generation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 48: “Like its definition, the Romantic Fragment is complete (this oxymoron was intended to disturb, as the hedge-hog’s quills make its enemies uncomfortable): separate from the rest of the universe, the Fragment nevertheless suggests distant perspectives. Its separation, indeed, is aggressive: it projects into the universe precisely by the way it cuts itself off.”