" His patriotic poems, often
composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the
roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric
in Koerner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and
firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's
lyrics, Koerner's poems are actual documents in the struggle for
liberty-verses which affected men.
The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry
of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which
loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past.
Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty,
tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to
the poets.
Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of
the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff
(1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however,
followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough
for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrived a day
too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no
means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that
in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their
poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After
him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie
outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.
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