ons of Eastern poets.
Where he has borrowed images or phrases, (as sometimes from the Koran,)
they are woven, without any discernible seam, into the texture of his
own brain.

Some of Rueckert's critics have asserted that his extraordinary mastery
of all the resources of language operated to the detriment of his
poetical faculty,--that the feeling to be expressed became subordinate
to the skill displayed by expressing it in an unusual form. They claim,
moreover, that he produced a mass of sparkling fragments, rather than
any single great work. I am convinced, however, that the first charge is
unfounded, basing my opinion upon my knowledge of the poet's simple,
true, tender nature, which I learned to appreciate during my later
visits to his home. After the death of his wife, the daughter who
thereafter assumed her mother's place in the household wrote me frequent
accounts of her father's grief and loneliness, enclosing manuscript
copies of the poems in which he expressed his sorrow. These poems are
exceedingly sweet and touching; yet they are all marked by the same
flexile use of difficult rhythms and unprecedented rhymes. They have
never yet been published, and I am therefore withheld from translating
any one of them, in illustration.

Few of Goethe's minor songs are more beautiful than his serenade, _O
gib' vom weichen Pfuehle_, where the interlinked repetitions are a
perpetual surprise and charm; yet Rueckert has written a score of more
artfully constructed and equally melodious songs. His collection of
amatory poems entitled _Liebesfruehling_ contains some of the sunniest
idyls in any language. That his genius was lyrical and not epic, was not
a fault; that it delighted in varied and unusual metres, was an
exceptional--perhaps in his case a phenomenal--form of development; but
I do not think it was any the less instinctively natural. One of his
quatrains runs:--

"Much I make as make the others;
Better much another man
Makes than I; but much, moreover,
Make I which no other can."

His poetical comment on the translation of Hariri is given in
prose:--"He who, like myself, unfortunate man! is philologist and poet
in the same person, cannot do better than to translate as I do. My
Hariri has illustrated how philology and poetry are competent to
stimulate and to complete each other. If thou, reader, wilt look upon
this hybrid production neither too philologically nor over-poetically,
it may deli