76, 36, 31), gained much in clearness of outline, and came to reflect the old Germanic hero-spirit (Nos. 2, 3, 46). Materials taken from the feudal life of the Middle Ages were dear to him (Nos. 88, 71, 83, 46), and he made the freest use of the Volkslied (Nos. 36, 5, 31, 83). Carefully wrought-out perfection of technical form was to him a matter of conscience. His talent was always more epic than lyric; he had a true sense of nature (Nos. 71, 14, 95); his love for the picturesque landscape of Swabia constantly appeared in his verse (Nos. 76, 3, 95, 12). His themes have a homely, domestic quality, but withal no lack of pith: all is sound, genuine, German, full of fresh air, and dignified by unswerving moral earnestness. In Mörike, the last representative of the Swabian group (No. 60), we find a marvellous artistic sense and lyric grace.

The heroic days of 1813, when Prussia made its final exertion to throw off French tyranny, called forth the fiery lays of the poets of the War of Liberation. The most popular of these was the young hero Theodor Körner, whose religious patriotic devotion was sealed by the sacrifice of his life on the field of battle. His poems are the immediate birth of impassioned moments, full of life and deep sentiment (No. 50); he escapes the narrow spirit of revenge and hatred which animated some of his fellows, and which aroused Goethe's aversion for the whole group.

Rückert, whose intense patriotism was expressed in vehement war-songs, was a poet of wide range and endless productivity, whose ease in verse-making sometimes tempted him to do careless and trivial work. His love of country was strong (No. 6); he struck the note of childlike simplicity (Nos. 22, 6), thanks to his feeling for popular sources, - and he was especially an interpreter of romantic love between the sexes (No. 99).

Youthful freshness of spirit and wholesome fun (Nos. 4, 93) make Wilhelm Müller perennially attractive to young people.

The political tendency of his Songs of the Greeks gave him his chief fame while living (cf. No. 4). Müller was a highly sympathetic interpreter of the various moods of nature (Nos. 21, 17, 72). As to his employment of the popular material of the Wunderhorn (cf. No. 1), Heine wrote to him (June 7, 1826): "I am magnanimous enough even to repeat plainly and you shall some day hear it spoken out publicly — that I first clearly learned from the reading of your 'Seventy-seven Songs' how out of the old existing Volkslied-forms are to be constructed new forms, which shall themselves be popular, without any necessary imitation of the awkwardness and crudeness of the older language." An example of Müller's use of older motives for more conscious effects is found in No. 24. Not to be overlooked is his exquisite delicacy of sentiment (No. 72). The spirit of his work was felt by poets like Reinick (Nos. 58, 33, 34) and Baumbach (Nos. 59, 61).

Hauff reflects the spirit of the Volkslied, and his productions are free from the prevalent fault of the early romanticists, the predilection for mystical and ill-defined elements: his popular motives are fresh, clear-cut, and simple, and some of his poems have become nineteenth-century Volkslieder (Nos. 37, 51).

The poet Platen, whose youth was much influenced by the romantic movement, was of too classic and aristocratic a temperament to remain long in fellowship with it; he must be especially mentioned as the poet of finished artistic form, as one who causes the reader to forget the ruggedness of the German language, and whose work has the distinction of complete symmetry, stateliness, and musical rhythm (Nos. 85, 117). His poetry is tinged with the deep melancholy which pervaded

his life.

Heinrich Heine was the last product of romanticism, although, by the irony of fate, it was his own keen blade which was to give it a finishing thrust. His earlier work was firmly

rooted in its soil (No. 13); he exploited the materials of the Volkslied more fully than any other German poet had done. With a heart passionately hungry for the world of dreams, his life was rent by his hopeless failure to reconcile this yearning with the prosaic facts of his environment (No. 105). He turned his marvellous wit against his own sentimentality, as well as that of the whole romantic school, and held it up to ridicule. There is in his poems a perfect grace and delicacy of form, a music which steals irresistibly into the heart (Nos. 27, 64, 65, 66); no lyric poet, except perhaps Goethe, has gained so sure a hold upon his people. We cannot fail to admire his fine sensibility, his keen perception of the full poetic value of some simple situation. There is often a fine and pure sentiment which rings true (Nos. 78, 53, 13, 38), but this is likely to pass into overwrought sentimentality and pinchbeck emotion. His sea-poems, with their refreshing breeze and their dash of briny waves, had the effect of entire originality (No. 73). During his long exile his heart returned continually to his native land, and yet he was hardly a true German: he had too little downright earnestness and sincerity. He failed to round out his own life into a symmetrical whole. Even his wit is often forced, and his apparently childlike naïveté sometimes covers a lack of true simplicity. In his inmost nature lay a certain vein of vulgarity; he was a literary offspring of Byron; he never lost his craving to strike attitudes before the public.

III. THE PERIOD OF POLITICAL TRANSITION

The years from 1830 to 1848 were alive with revolutionary influences. There was a widespread feeling that a new epoch was at the door, that the conventional forms of society and government were about to be superseded by a more liberal, humane, and democratic order of things. Those who gave

themselves up to the calm contemplation of classic beauty were reproached with indifference to the actual joys and sorrows of their fellow-men. Political and social questions became the theme of lyric poetry. Everywhere was acrid criticism and unsparing attack: the characteristic poets were political agitators, who were compelled to leave Germany and live in exile. Typical is Herwegh, who spent many years in Switzerland and France. In a style which has been termed "journalism set to music" he sounded a stirring battle-cry of freedom, asserting an unbending independence and a deathless scorn of slaves and cowards (No. 91). In keen and defiant tones (No. 52) he proclaims the breaking of all bonds with the past, and incites to revolution, with all its hazards; in spite of its eloquent swing his work has a flavor of rhetoric and demagogism.

Count Strachwitz, a member of the ancient nobility, although less radical than Herwegh in his political program, had some very "modern" views of life. He rejected completely the doctrine of resignation and submission, and preached the gospel of self-assertion of seizing, fighting, and winning, as set forth in Tennyson's Locksley Hall and Maud (cf. No. 90). Above all things, he loathed mediocrity. He gave clear and vigorous expression to the primitive (far too primitive) instincts of human nature, as if "human nature" had any inalienable rights which evolution is bound to respect. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, radical and revolutionary in his political poetry, was withal a man who had thoroughly lived into and appreciated the old-German spirit, as witness his homely and simple Abendlied (No. 15).

The apparent failure of the revolution of 1848 sensibly abated the ardent expectation of social change, and, in general, although the fiery political spirit was by no means dead, brought a settling back into more conservative ideals. Emanuel Geibel was the most popular German poet during the

period from 1848 to 1871, and is to be reckoned among the most wholesome and worthy singers of our century, although certain modern critics assume a patronizing, not to say contemptuous tone toward his work, which they consider hopelessly conservative and respectable. He had a reverent piety toward the historic past of Germany, and was a foe to destructive radicalism. There is no astonishing originality or titanic force in his creations; they do not offer to jaded nerves that intense thrill which accompanies the free handling of high explosives capable of blowing our slowly-evolved civilization into atoms; he was decidedly opposed to the "emancipation of the flesh" which some of the younger democrats demanded; he had religious feelings (Nos. 110, 20), but he was none the less manly and hearty; his sentiment is deep, intense, and genuine (Nos. 113, 110, 69). A citizen of the free republic of Lübeck, his every heart-beat was for political liberty, but he had little sympathy with the fiery rhetoric which begins and ends in declamation and denunciation. His work shows epic vigor, action, and life (Nos. 47, 54), deriving much from the Volkslied, from the old English ballads, and, particularly, from Uhland, whose spirit he has caught, although being himself of a less rugged nature; he shares Uhland's conscientiousness in matters of verse-technique. Like Uhland he loves nature, and makes effective use of its imagery (Nos. 20, 113, 54); like him, also, he is full of German fresh-heartedness and love of life, of hope, courage, and cheer (Nos. 20, 118, 54).

The pietistic and sentimental poet Karl Gerok, though possessing but a limited range of expression, has true delicacy, sweetness, and melody. His Herbstgefühl (No. 19) is a graceful interpretation of nature in one of her emotional moods.