and _"O valleys wide!"_ with
Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import.

Yet Eichendorff does not attract either by the variety of his themes
or of his rhymes. It is his very repetitions which so endear him
to the popular heart. His is not passionate poetry, nor does it
subjectively portray the soul-life of its author. In fact, it is saved
from monotony of content at times only by its extreme honesty and
its lovable simplicity. There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting
landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description,
none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over
Eichendorff's landscapes--the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time,
this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind. Paul
Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always
carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a
feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel
a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of
our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our
hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes.
* * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never
oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were
singing her child to sleep."

The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, _From the Life of
a Good-for-nothing_ (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich
Schlegel's doctrine of divine laziness--a delightful story, abounding
in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young
heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings.
What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws
away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more naive
than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the
fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground.
There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of class distinctions;
the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own
rank. The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the
hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some
potentate--he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing.
The weather-eye on probability is what in later times has helped the
Romanticists to slip so easily into Realism--and to reactionary views.

Of all the