might present myself to him like a statue or a fossil. Madame von Kalb advised me above all things to be cold and self-possessed, and I went without warmth, merely from curiosity. His house, palace rather, pleased me; it is the only one in Weimar in the Italian style-with such steps! A Pantheon full of pictures and statues. Fresh anxiety oppressed my breast! At last the god entered, cold, one-syllabled, without accent. "The French are drawing toward Paris," said Knebel. "Hm!" said the god. His face is massive and animated, his eye a ball of light. But, at last, the conversation led from the campaign to art, publications, etc., and Goethe was himself. His conversation is not so rich and flowing as Herder's, but sharp-toned, penetrating, and calm. At last he read, that is, played for us, an unpublished poem, in which his heart impelled the flame through the outer crust of ice, so that he pressed the hand of the enthusiastic Jean Paul. (It was my face, not my voice, for I said not a word.) He did it again when we took leave, and pressed me to call again. By heaven! we will love each other! He considers his poetic course as closed. His reading is like deep-toned thunder, blended with soft, whispering rain-drops. There is nothing like it. The same letter, that of June 17, tells of an interview with Schiller. The adjective used by Richter to characterize this great and popular poet, will probably surprise most readers. Richter's language implies that Schiller's personal presence was generally felt on first approach to be repellent: I went yesterday to see the stony Schiller, from whom, as from a precipice, all strangers spring back. His form is worn, severely powerful, but angular. He is full of sharp, cutting power, but without love. His conversation is nearly as excellent as his writings. As I brought a letter from Goethe he was unusually pleasant; he would make me a fellow-contributor to the Horen a [periodical], and would give me a naturalization act in Jena. For a moment, then, Jean Paul was with the circle of Goethe and Schiller; but he was never, for a moment, of that circle. It was soon after his return to Hof that he wrote to Knebel those words which cut so to the quick through the usually impenetrable mail of Goethe: "In such stormy times we need a Tyrtæus rather than a Propertius." Their difference in patriotic feeling worked as strongly as did their difference in intellectual and moral sentiment, among the things that held Richter and Goethe asunder. Richter was a patriot and Goethe was a lover of culture. Richter, still unmarried, though thirty-five years old, was in due course attracted to Berlin. Here he was received with measureless welcome. The queen was his friend. The whole court, therefore, was of course at his service. "So much hair has been begged of me," he writes, "that if I were to make it a traffic I could live as well from the outside of my cranium as from what is inside it." At Berlin he met his fate, a welcome one and a fortunate, in becoming acquainted with the lovely and accomplished woman who was to be his wife. The union was, on both sides, very happy. Whoever wishes to read a fairly full sketch of the life of this most individual and most interesting man, should endeavor to find a biography written or compiled from various sources by Mrs. E. Buckminster Lee. Mrs. Lee writes in a spirit of contagious sympathy with her subject, delightful to the reader. Jean Paul was a son of Anak in strength of health. But there came an end of this-to him, as there comes to all. He had loved to study and work out of doors. When the time arrived—and it arrived early for so stalwart a man—that he had to shut himself up and guard himself against the weather, the change was a marked one, and it boded the end as nigh. The loss of a son, cut off in young manhood, broke the father's heart. He still worked, but the spring of hope and joy in work had failed. When he wrote, he wrote with his eyes streaming tears over the memory of his son. From this cause, or from some cause, his sight was impaired. Gradually he became quite blind. Amid affectionate ministrations from wife and kindred and friends, he passed thus a lingering night of darkness, helpless, but pathetically gentle and lovely in his helplessness, till he died. They buried him by torchlight, the manuscript of his last work, still unfinisheda tractate on the immortality of the soul-borne, a symbol, on his coffin. But the tears of a nation that loved the man as well as the author made an amber to embalm him for immortality. There had ceased a German such as never was before, such as never would be after. It was Jean Paul the Only! VIII. INTERLUDE OF POETS. RICHTER, with whom we have just done dealing, is customarily, by his countrymen, reckoned a "poet "—this, although the form of his production was prose, not verse. But Richter's writing, even if you consider it poetry, is not easy reading; and the same is true of Herder's—" poem," though, with Richter, you consider that great author to be. In the last two chapters, accordingly, our readers may have found their task a trifle serious. A change, perhaps, will be grateful-a change, if not exactly "from grave to gay," at least from grave to less grave. Let us interrupt the regular succession of name to name, in our list of the greater classic German authors, and, "so to interpose a little ease," listen now, for a while, to the mingling voices of some German writers whom we may set down as poets, without putting the word within marks of quotation. What we hear will be, "not from the grand old masters, not from the bards sublime," but from a select few of those lesser brethren of the tuneful choir-and of such in German literature there are many-who have sung, it may be, barely a single song or two that has caught and held the ear of the generations. We shall thus find opportunity to catch a few sweet tones, at least, descending from the Christian hymnody of the Germans—a rich and varied music, when heard in full choir, constituting one of the best glories of the German Par nassus. We begin with Hans Sachs (1494-1576). Hans Sachs was a shoemaker, but he disregarded the proverb and went beyond his last. He became what is called a master-singer (meistersinger). By this is meant that he attached himself to a regularly organized society, or guild, of men who made it a business to manufacture verses. Such manufacture, in those old days, went on at a redoubtable rate among Ger mans. The product was good or bad, of course, much according to the original gift, or lack of gift, that belonged to the particular singer. Hans Sachs was a natural poet, and he made a successful craftsman in verse accordingly. He was voluminous in production, having, to full measure, that seldom-wanting attribute of true genius, fecundity. His quantity, indeed, was so great that his quality could hardly fail to be comparatively less. When he had written poetry fifty-two years, he had turned out more than six thousand two hundred separate pieces, classified as follows: mastersongs, four thousand and upward; two hundred and eight comedies and tragedies; near two thousand "merry tales," dialogues, proverbs, fables, together with seventy-three songs, devotional and other. All this in verse; and he had written prose besides. Hans Sachs was a Protestant, with Luther. He praised the great reformer in an allegorical tale, which he entitled The Nightingale of Wittenberg. The nightingale, of course, is Luther, who lures the listening sheep, fallen among ravening beasts of prey, to a lovely flowery meadow where grass is green and waters are still. The pope appears in the poem, under the figure of a devouring lion. Hans Sachs's "merry tales" are his best and most characteristic productions. These have a quality of homely humor which is very flavorous. Hans Sachs deals with things sacred in a spirit of freedom which, to the modern sense, might well seem little short of sheer irreverence. Take the following for a sufficient example. It is the story of Saint Peter and the Goat. Saint Peter has hinted to the Almighty that things go rather awry down in the world, and offered, with the divine permission, to set them to rights. At that very moment there presents herself a peasant girl, complaining that she has her hands more than full with a hard day's work to do, and in the bargain a troublesome goat to mind. The Lord at once turns over this affair to Peter, and Peter experimentally undertakes the care of the goat-with result described as follows in Hans Sachs's verse, translated by Gost wick and Harrison-we trust to Professor Hosmer's cita tion: The young goat had a playful mind, The good apostle had to run, Till evening came; the goat was caught, Then, with a smile, to Peter said The Lord: "Well, friend, how have you sped? If such a task your powers has tried, How could you keep the world so wide?" Then Peter, with his toil distressed, His folly with a sigh confessed. "No, Master, 'tis for me no play To rule one goat for one short day; It must be infinitely worse To regulate the universe." It would hardly seem possible that, from the same genius which produced the foregoing, there could proceed so perfectly decorous, and withal so genuinely simple and hearty, a devotional inspiration as the following, presented in the way of Hans Sachs's farewell to our readers. We give four only out of the nine stanzas contained in the hymn: Why art thou thus cast down, my heart? He is thy Friend who all things made. Dost think thy prayers he doth not heed? And heaven and earth are his; My father and my God, who still |