the Wallenstein; but the author's highest power, as also his highest pleasure, is rather to be oratoric than to be dramatic. In this Schiller resembles Corneille. But in this Schiller surpasses Corneille. There are no speeches in the Polyeucte, for instance, comparable, for true eloquence, with the speeches of the Wallenstein. Not on the whole adapted to be a popular drama, the Wallenstein is, for thoughtful and elevated minds, as inexhaustibly ministrant to a certain pathetic and lofty delight as any thing we know in dramatic literature. You need long leisure for it, with a mood disengaged; and then the solemn mystery of power and pathos in the play weaves an extraordinary spell of dominance over your imagination and your heart. If it was not written by the greatest poet, it at least is for us the greatest poem in German lit

erature.

When Schiller and Goethe are brought together in thought with a view to the gauging of their comparative greatness, it should always be remembered that, for Schiller, twenty-five embarrassed and impoverished years constituted his whole term of literary activity; while Goethe, after he began to produce, enjoyed ease and affluence for more than sixty years. Consider duly all that this enormous disparity of chance for the two men imports, and, comparing then the actual achievement of the one with the actual achievement of the other, assuredly you will feel that Schiller rendered a full better account of himself than did Goethe.

Narrowness, with intensity, was contrasted in Schiller against breadth, with repose, in Goethe. Schiller's end in life. was literature, and fame through literature. Goethe's end in life was the culture of himself. Of neither was the end in life the noblest that might have been; but surely Schiller's was nobler than Goethe's. Correspondingly, too, the gain to the world, alike through literary product bequeathed, and through example exhibited of aim and of character, was, as we think, more from the less of the two than it was from the greater. For Goethe was undoubtedly planned to be both a greater man and a greater poet than Schiller.

XI.

THE ROMANCERS AND THE ROMANTICISTS.

We devote the present chapter to an assemblage of writers whom we may call the Romancers and the Romanticists. We shall be able, under this twofold title, to group a number of literary names, most of whom are very naturally associated, though as to some of them we may have to use a little gentle force to bring them thus kindly together.

A "Romancer" is not of course the same thing as a "Romanticist." A Romanticist is one who adopts, or who favors, a certain taste and style in literary composition; a free, subjective taste and style, best understood by the contrast of that stricter, severer form and spirit which we call the classic. A Romancer, as we choose now to use the term, is one who tells stories of a peculiar sort, stories in which popular legend and a weird supernatural enter as a considerable element.

Let us begin here with an author who unites in himself the character of Romancer with the character of Romanticist-Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853.)

While Tieck's living fame was yet in its most vivid freshness and brilliancy, Goethe, talking with Eckermann, said :

Tieck has a talent of great importance, and no one can be more sensible than myself to his extraordinary merits. Only when they [the more extravagant Romanticists] raise him above himself, and place him on a level with me, they are in error.

Tieck still remains for us a sufficiently important name to deserve respectful, though it must be hastening, attention at our hands.

This writer was not only a romanticist in literary taste and principle, but in his time the acknowledged head of the romantic school in German literature. It was easier for him to be vague than it was to be definite, and he liked it better. Moonlight was sweeter than sunlight to Tieck. Scherer quotes his lines :

Magical moonlit night,

Holding the senses fettered,

Wonderful fairy world,

Arise in thy glory—

and not unaptly calls them the "manifesto of Romanticism." This romanticist, however, was capable of the most homely realism in fiction; and such, in fact, was the cast of his later imaginative work.

Tieck was both poet and prose writer. It is as prose writer that he will most interest our readers. From among Tieck's short stories, the happiest of which are probably those embraced in the volume entitled Phantasus, we select The Fairhaired Eckbert to exhibit in abridgement here. Carlyle has translated this in his German Romance. We use his translation.

The scene of the story is laid in the Hartz region. The hero is a knight, familiarly called the Fair-haired Eckbert, who lived in seemingly contented retirement with his wife, lamenting only that she gave him no children. His quiet home was seldom visited by guests. But there was one man, Walther, with whom Eckbert formed a close relation of friendship-so close, in fact, that one evening, in a burst of confidence, he begged his wife Bertha to tell their trusted guest the singular story of her own maiden life. This she did. Having run away from her childhood's home, she had been welcomed, after wanderings many and wide, into the hospitality of a withered old woman's lonely cottage, where she long abode. The old woman had in her cottage two pet familiars—a bird and a dog. In this company, and seeing no other, Bertha lived and was happy. Let her now herself take up her story, as Tieck supplies her with words. Remember that Bertha is telling the tale, at her husband's wish, to Walther the guest:

I am surprised that I have never since been able to recall the dog's name, a very odd one, often as I then pronounced it.

Four years I had passed in this way (I must now have been nearly twelve) when my old dame began to put more trust in me, and at length told me a secret. The bird, I found, laid every day an egg, in which there was a pearl or a jewel. I had already noticed that she went often to fettle privately about the cage, but I had never troubied myself further on the

subject. She now gave me charge of gathering these eggs in her absence, and carefully storing them up in the strange-looking pots. She would leave me food, and sometimes stay away for weeks, for months.

The child Bertha had her books to read, and, quickened by these, she peopled her solitude with company born of her brooding brain. The bird was a weird one that could sing a song with words, as follows:

Alone in wood so gay

'Tis good to stay,
Morrow like to-day,

Forever and aye:
O, I do love to stay
Alone in wood so gay.

Bertha continues her tale, Walther listening:

I was now fourteen; it is the misery of man that he arrives at understanding through the loss of innocence. I now saw well enough that it lay with me to take the jewels and the bird in the old woman's absence, and go forth with them to see the world which I had read of. Perhaps, too, it would then be possible that I might meet the fairest of all knights, who forever dwelt in my memory.

Bertha dallied with her thought of taking the bird and the jewels and going away with them-but now Tieck once more, through his Bertha proceeding with her story:

One day she [the old woman] went out again, telling me that she should be away on this occasion longer than usual; that I must take strict charge of every thing, and not let the time hang heavy on my hands. I had a sort of fear on taking leave of her, for I felt as if I should not see her any more.

...

I knew not what to make of it; the dog leaped up continually about me; the sunshine spread abroad over the fields; the green birch-trees glittered; I always felt as if I had something I must do in haste; so I caught the little dog, tied him up in the room, and took the cage with the bird under my arm. The dog writhed and whined under this unusual treatment; he looked at me with begging eyes, but I feared to have him with me. I also took one pot of jewels, and concealed it by me; the rest

I left. The bird turned its head very strangely when I crossed the threshold; the dog tugged at his cord to follow me, but he was forced to stay. . . .

In a pleasant town I hired a small house and garden, and took

to myself a maid. I forgot the old woman and my former way of life rather more, and, on the whole, I was contented.

For a long while the bird had ceased to sing; I was, therefore, not a little frightened when one night he suddenly began again, and with a different rhyme. He sang:

Alone in wood so gay,

Ah, far away!

But thou wilt say

Some other day,

"Twere best to stay

Alone in wood so gay.

The aspect of the bird distressed me greatly; he looked at me continually, and his presence did me ill. There was now no end to his song; he sang it louder and more shrilly than he had been wont. The more I looked at him the more he pained and frightened me; at last I opened the cage, put in my hand, and grasped his neck; I squeezed my fingers hard together, he looked at me, I slackened them; but he was dead. I buried him in the garden.

After this there often came a fear over me for my maid; I looked back upon myself, and fancied she might rob or murder me. For a long while I had been acquainted with a young knight whom I altogether liked; I bestowed on him my hand, and with this, Sir Walther, ends my story.

Walther, bidding good-night, incidentally supplied to Bertha the forgotten name of the dog. He said:

"Many thanks, noble lady. I can well figure you beside your singing bird, and how you fed poor little Strohmian."

The rest of Tieck's story of The Fair-haired Eckbert we force into brief condensation :

...

From that day Walther visited the castle of his friend but seldom. . . . Eckbert was exceedingly distressed by this demeanor. One morning Bertha sent for her husband to her bedside. "Dear Eckbert," she began, "I must disclose a secret to thee. . . That night, on taking leave, Walther all at once said to me: 'I can well figure you, how you fed poor little Strohmian.' . . . I felt a shudder that a stranger should help me to recall the memory of my secrets. What sayest thou, Eckbert?"

...

Eckbert.. spoke some words of comfort to her, and went out. Waither for many years had been his sole companion, and now this person was the only mortal in the world whose existence pained and oppressed him. He took his bow, to dissipate these thoughts, and went He found no game, and this embittered his ill-humor; all

to hunt.

...