e establishment
of a higher culture and more artistic forms of life by the side of the
simple agriculture of the lower class. He who follows his plough will
seldom be a member of a company which extend their speculations to the
distant corners of the earth; he will not read Homer in the original,
he will hardly read the work of a German philosopher upon logic, and
the easy intercourse of a modern _salon_ will scarcely be enlivened by
his wit. But the results of the collective culture, of that which the
learned find, which the artist forms, which manufacturers create, must,
at a period when the nation is vigorous and sound, when accessible to
the simple countryman of sound judgment, be comprehended and valued by
him.

Is it necessary that our neighbour the countryman should so seldom read
a good book, and still less often buy one? Is it necessary that he
should, as a rule, take in no other newspaper than the small sheet of
his own district? Is it necessary that it should be unknown to him, and
unfortunately sometimes also to his schoolmaster, how an angle is
determined, a parallelogram measured, and an ellipse drawn? Whoever
would now place a poem of Goethe's in the hand of a peasant woman,
would probably do a useless thing, and raise a dignified smile in a
"well-educated spectator." Must all that we possess of most beautiful
be incomprehensible to half our nation? Six hundred years ago, the poem
of Farmer Helmbrecht was understood in the village parlour, and the
charm of his sonorous verse, the poetry and the warm eloquence of his
language, were appreciated; and the rhythm and measure of those old
songs that accompanied the dances of the thirteenth century are just as
elegant and artistic as the finest verses now in the poems of the
greatest modern poets. There was a time when the German peasant had the
same lively susceptibility for noble poetry which we now assume as the
privilege of the highly educated. Is it necessary that the peasant of
the present day should be deficient in it? The Bohemian village
musician still plays with heartfelt delight the harmonious tones
produced by the genius of Haydn and Mozart; is it necessary that few
other musical sounds should be permitted to the German peasant than the
stale measures of spiritless dances? All this is not necessary;
something of the same barbarism benumbs our life which we perceive with
astonishment in the time of Christian Garve.

What, however, we consider at fir