ften the singers do not know that
what they are singing has a literary origin--they have thoroughly
assimilated it. In the best sense of the term, the songs of _The Boy's
Magic Horn_ are folk-songs. They are both narrative and dramatic as
well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in
expression. They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a
crude version of the _Lay of Hildebrant_ to the riddles, lullabies,
and counting-out rhymes of children. Pictures of the moral and social
life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the
supernatural. Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and
mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems
about tailors--a favorite butt of the peasant past. Ballads of popular
origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous
Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here.
Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and
occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the
collection is of surprising merit. It is a product of the Romantic
return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the
future. Of the work as a whole Heine says, "I cannot praise the book
enough. It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit,
and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him
read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat
of the German folk. It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness,
all their foolish reason. Here German anger beats its drum, here is
the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love."

The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is
definite and well-recognized. The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the
politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller
proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power: The Romantic longing
for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of
the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but
induced a tremendous patriotism as well. The cosmopolitan temper which
caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to
him, gave way before an intenser nationalism. The earlier Romanticists
began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became
a propaganda. It was also precipitated in verse and prose. The spark
came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of
the