k falls into meaningless jingle, Brentano
succeeds, not merely in suggesting but in producing the effect, as in
his _Merry Musicians_ (1803), or in bringing about its latent mood,
as in his _Spinner's Song_ or in his version of the old
folk-epithalamium, "Come out, come out, thou lovely, lovely bride."

Brentano's prose tales vary in quality from the over-allegorized
latter part of _The Fairy Tale of the Rhine and the Miller Radlauf_
(1816) to the simple and homely _Kasper and Annie_ (1817), with its
elemental clash of soldiers and citizens. Through many of the tales
there runs a note of satire and of symbolism, but the fancy is
exuberant and the interest well maintained. Brentano's discovery
of the Rhine as an object of poetry and veneration is completely
summarized in _Radlauf_, where the Rhine lyrics are often of wonderful
beauty and definiteness and the river becomes a benevolent _deus ex
machina_, who--significantly--in dreams, guides and aids the simple,
honest miller in his search for a bride.

Later in life, Brentano returned to the Roman Church into which he
had been baptized as a child, and gradually withdrew from literary
activity. Long before his death in 1842, he had renounced his earlier
life as wicked and abhorrent, and had given himself over entirely to
the Church. But his career with its constant wanderings, its lack
of permanency of occupation, of family ties, and of a real home,
his inability to grow old, his inner unreality, his excessive
productivity-in short, all that is incomplete, over-stimulated,
destructive of self, make him the most typical figure of the later
Romantic group.

Ludwig Achim von Arnim (1781-1831) is by no means so bizarre a figure.
Born in Berlin of a noble family, he inherited a peculiar
patriotism and his love of culture, and developed these without
the eccentricities which characterized his brother-in-law. The main
influences of his early years were Goethe and Jena, but, as a direct
inspiration, Tieck must also be mentioned. Arnim's early works lie
largely in the field of natural science, especially in physics. He had
little of Brentano's lyric gift; indeed, his poems, where not wooden,
are often merely reminiscent. They show, too, in an unusual degree,
the ability to adapt himself to another's mood and assimilate it--that
which the Germans call "Nachempfinden," a quality which stood him in
excellent stead in his work on _The Boy's Magic Horn_.

The drama _Halle and Jeru