ed by a misguided manhood, and he
died in his forty-seventh year.

It fell to the lot of the young Goethe, then an unknown reviewer, to
write for the Frankfurter Gelehrte Anzeigen in November, 1772, a notice
of some of Buerger's early poems. "The 'Minnelied' of Mr. Buerger," he
says, "is worthy of a better age; and if he has more such happy moments,
these efforts of his will be among the most potent influences to render
our sentimental poetasters, with their gold-paper Amors and Graces and
their elysium of benevolence and philanthropy, utterly forgotten." With
such clear vision could Goethe see at the age of twenty-three. But he
soon saw also the danger that lay in unbridled freedom. For the best
that was in Buerger Goethe retained his admiration to the last, but
before he was thirty he felt that their ways had parted. Among the
'Maxims and Reflections' we find this note:--"It is sad to see how an
extraordinary man may struggle with his time, with his circumstances,
often even with himself, and never prosper. Sad example, Buerger!"

Doubtless German literature owes less to Buerger than English owes to
Burns, but it owes much. Buerger revived the ballad form in which so much
of the finest German poetry has since been cast. With his lyric gifts
and his dramatic power, he infused a life into these splendid poems that
has made them a part of the folk-lore of his native land. 'Lenardo und
Blandine,' his own favorite, 'Des Pfarrers Tochter von Taubenhain' (The
Pastor's Daughter of Taubenhain), 'Das Lied vom braven Mann' (The Song
of the Brave Man), 'Die Weiber von Weinsberg' (The Women of Weinsberg),
'Der Kaiser und der Abt' (The Emperor and the Abbot), 'Der Wilde Jaeger'
(The Wild Huntsman), all belong, like 'Lenore,' to the literary
inheritance of the German people. Buerger attempted a translation of the
Iliad in iambic blank verse, and a prose translation of 'Macbeth.' To
him belongs also the credit of having restored to German literature the
long-disused sonnet. His sonnets are among the best in the language, and
elicited warm praise from Schiller as "models of their kind." Schiller
had written a severe criticism of Buerger's poems, which had inflamed
party strife and embittered the last years of Buerger himself; but even
Schiller admits that Buerger is as much superior to all his rivals as he
is inferior to the ideal he should have striven to attain.

The debt which Buerger owed to English letters was amply repaid. In