Paul
Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always
carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a
feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel
a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of
our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our
hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes.
* * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never
oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were
singing her child to sleep."
The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, _From the Life of
a Good-for-nothing_ (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich
Schlegel's doctrine of divine laziness--a delightful story, abounding
in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young
heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings.
What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws
away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naive
than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the
fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground.
There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions;
the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own
rank. The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the
hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some
potentate--he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing.
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