salem_ (1810) is an amalgamation of the story
of Cardenio and Celinde used by Gryphius and Immermann, with the story
of the Wandering Jew. The first four acts take place in Halle where
Cardenio is a teacher and where he is living in incestuous relation
with Olympia. He is a Faust-nature and his father is Ahasuerus.
The fifth act is taken up with a pilgrimage to Jerusalem where the
romantic fates of the characters are decided. The play abounds in
contemporary satire and, as in all of Arnim's work, there is distinct
emphasis on action, the goal of human endeavor.

Arnim's prose is better than his verse. Soon, in _The Guardians of
the Crown_ (1817; volume 2 unfinished and published in his literary
remains, 1854), he strikes an individual note. This novel is one
of the best products of German Romanticism. The Guardians are a
mysterious secret organization who guard the imperial crown in a fairy
castle and are favorable to the ancient house of Hohenstaufen but
inimical to the ruling Habsburgs. The basis is the newly awakening
ideal of German unity but Arnim fails to express this clearly, and
the concluding motif, that Germany's crown is to be spiritually won,
resolves the whole into a frosty allegory. The progress of the story
is, however, extremely interesting; the whole spacious and varied
scene of medieval life is there, and as Tieck and Wackenroder
discovered Nuremberg, and Brentano the Rhine, so Arnim may be said to
have shown in its full activity the Ghibelline city of Waiblingen. It
is, to be sure, a Romantic Waiblingen, and not the real city, as Arnim
himself was afterward forced to admit with some disappointment when he
actually saw it. But as Arnim portrays it, it rises to typical value
without losing any of its poetic individuality. It is the city of the
Hohenstaufens, the last stand of medievalism against the encroachment
of a new civilization. The echoes from Gotz von Berlichingen are at
once apparent to the reader. But Arnim's city of the sixteenth century
does not look backward only; the conflicts in it point forward also.
Its abbess is not the traditional pious, fat old lady, but a tall,
thin, practical and active woman. Its Faust is a figure of aggressive
naturalism, a charlatan and quack who practises blood-transfusion on
the hero and who lies drunk in a pig-sty--a scene which shows Arnim's
power of drastic contrast at its best. The hero, Berthold, does
not sit back and wait for the crown to come to him, bu