e of them, two thalers, for the sacred
cause. A noble impulse thrilled through Germany. Volunteers came from
far, many of whom were to ride with Luetzow's irregular horse in his
wild ventures. Most noteworthy of these was the gifted young poet,
Korner, a Saxon by birth, who now forsook a life of ease, radiant with
poetic promise, at the careless city of Vienna, to follow the Prussian
eagle. "A great time calls for great hearts," he wrote to his father:
"am I to write vaudevilles when I feel within me the courage and
strength for joining the actors on the stage of real life?" Alas! for
him the end was to be swift and tragic. Not long after inditing an ode
to his sword, he fell in a skirmish near Hamburg.

Germany mourned his loss; but she mourned still more that her greatest
poet, Goethe, felt no throb of national enthusiasm. The great Olympian
was too much wrapped up in his lofty speculations to spare much
sympathy for struggling mortals below: "Shake your chains, if you
will: the man (Napoleon) is too strong for you: you will not break
them." Such was his unprophetic utterance at Dresden to the elder
Korner. Men who touched the people's pulse had no such doubts. "Ah!
those were noble times," wrote Arndt: "the fresh young hope of life
and honour sang in all hearts; it echoed along every street; it rolled
majestically down every chancel." The sight of Germans thronging from
all parts into Silesia to fight for their Prussian champions awakened
in him the vision of a United Germany, which took form in the song,
"What is the German's Fatherland?"[286]

Against this ever-rising tide of national enthusiasm Napoleon pitted
the resources which Gallic devotion still yielded up to his demands.
They were surprisingly great. In less than half a year, after the loss
of half a million of men, a new army nearly as numerous was marshalled
under the imperial eagles. Thirty thousand tried troops were brought
from Spain, thereby greatly relieving the pressure on Wellington.
Italy and the garrison towns of the Empire sent forth a vast number.
But the majority were young, untrained troops; and it was remarked
that the conscripts born in the years of the Terror, 1793-4, had not
the stamina of the earlier levies. Brave they were, superbly brave;
and the Emperor sought by every means to breathe into them his own
indomitable spirit. One of them has described how, on handing them
their colours, he made a brief speech; and, at the close, rising