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Kerner (Justinus Andreas, 1786 1862) had a delicate lyrical vein of pathos, almost quaint, enough sometimes to be humorous in effect. The following piece, translated by the sure hand of our American Bryant, is a fair specimen: In yonder mill I rested,

And sat me down to look
Upou the wheel's quick glume,
And ou the flowing brook.

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Let Rückert (Friedrich, 1789-1866) close the cycle of German patriot lyrists. Rückert was a learned Orientalist as well as a versatile master of metres. He was one of that numerous band of spirited German youths through whom, during the War of Liberation, the fatherland uttered musically its long-suppressed cry of desire for life from the dead. Professor C. C. Felton is our translator for the following caustic lyrical satire of Rückert's, entitled, The Patriot's Lament:

"What forgest, smith?

"We're forging chains; ay, chains!" "Alas! to chains yourselves degraded are!"

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Why plowest, farmer?" "Fields their fruit must bear." "Yes, seed for foes; the burr for thee remains!

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"What aim'st at, sportsman?" "Yonder stag, so fat."

"To hunt you down, like stag and roe, they'll try.” "What snarest, fisher?" "Yonder fish, so shy." "Who's there to save you from your fatal net?"

"What art thou rocking, sleepless mother?"

Boys."

"Yes; let them grow, and wound their country's fame,
Slaves to her foes, with parricidal arm !”
"" "Words of flame;

"What art thou writing, poet?

I mark my own, record my country's harm,
Whom thought of freedom never more employs."

I blame them not who with the foreign steel

Tear out our vitals, pierce our inmost heart;
For they are foes created for our smart,
And when they slay us, why they do it, feel.
But, in these paths, ye seek what recompense?

For you what brilliant toys of fame are here,
Ye mongrel foes, who lift the sword and spear
Against your country, not for her defense?

Ye Franks, Bavarians, and ye Swabians, say,
Ye aliens, sold to bear the slavish name,

What wages for your servitude they pay.

Your eagle may perchance redeem your fame;

More sure his robber-train, ye birds of prey,

To coming ages shall prolong your shame!

Kerner (Justinus Andreas, 1786-1862) had a delicate. lyrical vein of pathos, almost quaint enough sometimes to be humorous in effect. The following piece, translated by the sure hand of our American Bryant, is a fair specimen: In yonder mill I rested,

And sat me down to look
Upon the wheel's quick glimmer,
And on the flowing brook.

As in a dream before me,

The saw, with restless play,
Was cleaving through a fir-tree
Its long and steady way.

The tree through all its fibres
With living motion stirred,
And, in a dirge-like murmur,
These solemn words I heard:

"O thou who wanderest hither,
A timely guest thou art!
For thee this cruel engine

Is passing through my heart.

When soon, in earth's still bosom,
Thy hours of rest begin,

This wood shall form the chamber

Whose walls shall close thee in."

Four planks-I saw and shuddered-
Dropped in that busy mill;
Then, as I tried to answer,

At once the wheel was still.

The same translating touch, that of Bryant, attracts us to one other lyrical piece, with which we bring our "Interlude of Poets" to its close. This is from Niclas Müller (1809-1875). It is entitled, The Paradise of Tears:

Beside the River of Tears, with branches low,
And bitter leaves, the weeping willows grow;
The branches stream like the disheveled hair
Of woman in the sadness of despair.

On rolls the stream with a perpetual sigh;
The rocks moan wildly as it passes by;
Hyssop and wormwood border all the straud,
And not a flower adorns the dreary land.

Then comes a child, whose face is like the sun,
And dips the gloomy waters as they run,
And waters all the region, and behoid
The ground is bright with blossoms manifold.

Where fall the tears of love, the rose appears,

And where the ground is bright with friendship's tears,
Forget-me-not, and violets, heavenly blue,

Spring, glittering with the cheerful drops like dew.

The souls of mourners, all whose tears are dried,
Like swans, come gently floating down the tide,
Walk up the golden sands by which it flows,
And in that Paradise of Tears repose.

There every heart rejoins its kindred heart;
There in a long embrace that none may part,
Fulfillment meets desire, and that fair shore
Beholds its dwellers happy evermore.

Our "Interlude of Poets" is done. It was a concord of voices commingling to usher and herald the great singer Goethe.

IX.

GOETH E.

1749-1832.

IF Luther was the morning, Goethe was the meridian, sun of German literature. Schiller, it might almost be said, rising later and setting earlier, rode rival by Goethe's side through the dazzling zenith arcs of the sky. But these two orbs, both so large and so splendid, were not mutually equal, either in largeness or in splendor. Schiller was the less luminary; and of him it is praise enough to say that, shining so near to Goethe, he did not lose, did not pale, his lustre in the blaze of the superior ray.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, in Frankfort-onthe-Main, almost exactly in the middle of the eighteenth century. His parentage was excellent on both sides. His father was a tailor's son who had raised himself to some civic distinction, and his mother was daughter to the chief magistrate of Frankfort. The father was more than twice as old as the mother when they married; she indeed was a blooming young creature of only seventeen years of age. Wolfgang was the first-born of the pair. The mother was but eighteen years older than the son. There thus came to be a time when the two could share between them a fellowship approaching in kind that natural between those nearly equal in age. This, the temperament of the mother-happy, equable, serene, perennially young-made additionally easy. Such a mother was an immeasurable blessing to Goethe.

The father was a very different being. Stern, stiff, opinionated, a precisian, a pedant, he was well fitted to balance the equipment of the mother with qualities needful for the training of the boy to become the symmetrical, all-accomplished Goethe whom we know. Remarkable among the traits of the elder Goethe's character as disciplinarian to his son was his way of insisting that whatever Wolfgang began he should go on with till he carried it to completion.

From my father I derive my frame and the steady guidance of my life, and from my dear little mother my happy disposition and my love of story-telling.

So Goethe says and sings in one of his poems.

The early years of Goethe did not pass without yielding to the precocious boy much premature experience of life. This, in such form and degree as he thought it comportable with his dignity to indulge, he has himself shadowed forth to the public, directly in his autobiography, and indirectly in his autobiographical "novel," the Wilhelm Meister. He contracted soil to the innocence of youth-soil which, alas, the practice of manhood and of old age rather inveterated than removed. But the father, meantime, did not remit his intellectual demands on his boy; and his boy was still able to

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