great mass of material left by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
(1777-1843), only a lyric or two and the fairy tale _Undine_ have any
value for the present day. Fouque represents the talent which develops
in the glare of the world, is popular for a decade, but soon withers
when the sun is set. His relations to Romanticism are largely
external; he frequented the salons of Rachel Levin and Henrietta Herz
in Berlin, was aided by August von Schlegel, and was praised by
Jean Paul; but in his heart he was not inspired by any of the deeper
longings that characterize the true Romantic spirit. Even though he is
to be credited with the first modern dramatization of the Nibelungen
story, _The Hero of the North_ (1810), and though he took subjects
from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new
life to his rehabilitations. Fouque was too productive, too facile,
too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real.
He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism
becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a
thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength
and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a
Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking.

Only in his charming fairy-tale, _Undine_ (1811), does Fouque rise
above his _milieu. Undine_, the source of which, according to Fouque
himself, is to be found in a work of Paracelsus on supernatural
beings, remains one of the best creations of the Romantic school and,
like Eichendorff's novel, has become international, not only in
its original form but in the opera by Lortzing (first performance,
Hamburg, 1845). The value of the story lies in the author's power
to make the reader believe in Undine, the water sprite, and in
the presentation of a new nature-mythology. All Romanticists have
consciously or unconsciously attempted to satisfy Friedrich Schlegel's
demand for anew mythology: Fouque's earth, air, and water spirits
people the elements with graceful forms from the world of nature; the
nymph Undine in the form of a flowing stream embraces even in death
the grave of her lover.

Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was not fundamentally a Romantic
personality. He is called "the classicist of Romanticism," and
with justice. The term shows that he is felt to have something of
completion, of inner perfection, of harmony of form and content which
was lacking in the