Eichendorff is a thorough _pleinairiste_, filled with the atmosphere
of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart
from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near
Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the
ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized
the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle.
Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the
splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong
and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a
Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought
comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise
to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German
literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's
beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see
how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature
into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that
youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued
to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad,
deep, manly piety.
Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by
Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count
Otto von Loeben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than
mediocre ability.
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