In
1815-18 he made a trip around the world, and in later years devoted
himself especially to the study of botany.
Only the poetry of Chamisso's later period is of supreme consequence.
As a man in the fifties, he wrote some of his most beautiful verse.
He was a naive poet, but a poet of many moods. His love poetry is the
poetry of longing, and ranks with that of Brentano in its ability to
suggest states of feeling. Among his best poems are his verse-tales,
such as _The Women of Weinsberg_, where his narrative genius ranks
with that of his fellow-countryman, La Fontaine. Especially good are
his poems in terzines. These mark the real introduction of this metre
into Germany. The best of these, _Salas y Gomez_, has the additional
advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the
basis of it is derived from his tour of circumnavigation. His poems in
this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently
of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French
fabliaux. His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as
_The Old Washerwoman_, to quote Goethe's _Tasso_, "he often ennobles
what seems vulgar to us."
Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early
reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of
indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency
toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took--the
way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through
Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other.
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