Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and
occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the
collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic
return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the
future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book
enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit,
and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him
read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat
of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness,
all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is
the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love."
The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is
definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the
politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller
proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing
for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of
the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but
induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which
caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to
him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists
began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became
a propaganda.
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