German people a large cultural fact. Fichte, like a true German,
emphasized education as the means of progress: Arnim grasped the
problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and
consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on
those sprung from the soil. In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the
ideal of the German people as an entity, as a nation.

There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to
the belligerent spirit of the day. They represent three phases of the
German character. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the
group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well
as the poet. He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric
poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its
deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by
the sword. Arndt is all virility and fire.

The life of Theodor Koerner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller's intimate
friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the
Germans are becoming more and more noted. Koerner was aroused from his
poetic diletantism by the alarms of war. He enlisted in the famous
Luetzow corps and died a soldier's death, thus becoming the symbol of
all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and
the poet, the man of "Lyre and Sword." His patriotic poems, often
composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the
roll of cannon and the beat of drum. The trace of Schiller's rhetoric
in Koerner's poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and
firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals. Like Arndt's
lyrics, Koerner's poems are actual documents in the struggle for
liberty-verses which affected men.

The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry
of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817). His was a quieter nature, which
loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past.
Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty,
tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to
the poets.

Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of
the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff
(1788-1857), was not of a military temperament. Even he, however,
followed the King of Prussia's call to arms but, significantly enough
for "the last Knight of Romanticism," as he was called, arrive