desire to have it renewed; then the belief that it would be renewed; then, last in the development, the hot urging of the military spirit against the oppressor that stood in the way of the renewal. Here is one of the "Sonnets in Armor" of the poet Rückert, a collection of pieces which have the patriotic fire of Arndt and Körner: What forge ye, smiths? "'Tis fetters we are making." Farmers, why plough? "Fruits must the field be bearing." Which dares not for its freedom to be fighting!" Rückert was one of the best Orientalists of his time, writing often under the inspiration caught from Eastern literatures. For his "Sonnets in Armor" mainly, however, he is to be classed among the Romanticists. Then Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano; Werner, -child of an insane mother, who believed herself, before his birth, the Virgin Mary pregnant with another Saviour, a wild dramatist, later a Catholic preacher at Vienna, awing the world with a half-mad eloquence; Hoffmann, the writer of weird romances, whose counterpart is 1 Geharnischte Sonetten. Poe,—all these, and many another in this time and race full of seething intellectual life, poets, talewriters, dreamers, scholars, we can link in one way or another to the Romantic school. There is only space for an account of the poet in whom Romanticism is considered to have come to its end, — Ludwig Uhland. Uhland, born in 1789, has died almost in our own day. In his youth he felt strongly the influence of Romanticism, then in its fullest tide, and went from Swabia, his native land, to Paris, to study mediæval manuscripts. In 1813 he sang the uprising of the German people. When the downfall of the French power occurred, he became diverted from his proper path and took part in politics, withstanding with noble courage the petty despotism which in Southern Germany, when the foreign domination was broken, sought to reëstablish itself. Starting with the Romanticists, he early showed a different tendency. He gave the school a new character, powerful with life; we may say he destroyed it, because he conquered its most essential characteristic, the dreamy, yearning, ideal indistinctness. Though a passionate admirer of the old literature, he felt no enthusiasm for the old empire; the intense subjectivity of Romanticism he forsook, and gave to the outer world due respect. Once more appeared in German literature the simplicity, truth, and unaffected grace of the volks-lied. His subjects are for the most part simple, and near to our sympathies; his lyrics sometimes pensive, but generally cheerful, abounding in love of nature, and sometimes humorous. His pop As his followers became ularity was unbounded. numerous they constituted what is called the Swabian school, several of them becoming poets of eminence. Perhaps his genius was at its best when he considered some mediæval subject, catching the spirit of the old minstrels, whose songs he so much loved. Of that kind is his famous drama, "Ernst von Schwaben," and many a sounding ballad which has the ring of the vigorous poets of the early time. I translate here the song which Heine calls the most beautiful of Uhland's songs, one which in his boyhood Heine declaimed, sitting among the ruins of the old castle at Düsseldorf, until he heard his voice reëchoed by the water-spirits from the Rhine: The handsome shepherd slowly strayed, To him with sweetest voice she cried: The youth her greeting straight returns: Thy cheek with rosy beauty burns, And white the arms I see." And when he now, with heart aglow, His flock each morning thither drove, He gazed, till in her turret, lo, Then he in friendly voice would say: The winter fled; then came spring-tide; He called with voice all full of woe; A ghost's voice down did ring! That Uhland, who in his younger manhood wrote with such enthusiasm and success, allowed the lyre to become silent in his hands, as his life went forward, is due no doubt to the circumstances among which he was thrown. In public life he stood forth bravely and at great sacrifice in defence of popular rights, civil equality, and intellectual freedom,—the great Protestant ideas. Naturally his interest in a past whose institutions were Catholic and feudal was lessened. As Heine puts it: "Precisely because his intentions were so honest as regards the modern time, he could no longer sing the songs of the old time with his former enthusiasm. Since his Pegasus was a knightly charger only, which liked to trot back into the past, but immediately stood still when urged forward into modern life, the honest Uhland smilingly dismounted, had the obstinate beast quietly unsaddled and led into the stable. There he stands to the present day, and like his colleague, the horse of Bayard, has only one fault, he is dead." 1 Die Romantische Schule. CHAPTER XVI. HEINRICH HEINE. In one of the old towns on the Rhine, I went to see a synagogue which tradition says was built before the Christian era. In Roman legions served certain Jews, who, stationed here on the frontier of Gaul, which had just been subdued, founded a temple of their faith. I felt that the low, blackened walls of time-defying masonry had, at any rate, an immense antiquity. The blocks of stone were beaten by the weather; the thresholds nearly worn through by the passing of feet; a deep hollow lay in a stone at the portal, where the multitude of generations had touched it with the finger in sacred observance. Within the low interior my Jewish guide told me a sorrowful legend, which was no doubt in part true, relating to a lamp burning with a double flame before the shrine. Once, in the old cruel days, that hatred might be excited against the Jews of the city, a dead child was secretly thrown by the Christians into the cellar of one of their faith. Straightway an accusation was brought by the contrivers of the trick; the child was found, and the innocent Hebrews accused of the murder. The authorities of the city threatened at once to throw the chief men of the congregation into a caldron of boiling oil if |