oves a huntsman
better, may seem very trivial, commonplace, and unpoetical to many a man
of forty or fifty. But there are men of forty and fifty who have never
lost sight of the bright but now far-off days of their own youth, who can
still rejoice with those that rejoice, and weep with those that weep, and
love with those that love,--aye, who can still fill their glasses with old
and young, and in whose eyes every-day life has not destroyed the poetic
bloom that rests everywhere on life so long as it is lived with warm and
natural feelings. Songs which, like the "Beautiful Miller's Daughter" and
the "Winter Journey," could so penetrate and again spring forth from the
soul of Franz Schubert, may well stir the very depths of our own hearts,
without the need of fearing the wise looks of those who possess the art of
saying nothing in many words. Why should poetry be less free than painting
to seek for what is beautiful wherever a human eye can discover, wherever
human art can imitate it? No one blames the painter if, instead of giddy
peaks or towering waves, he delineates on his canvas a quiet narrow
valley, filled with a green mist, and enlivened only by a gray mill and a
dark brown mill-wheel, from which the spray rises like silver dust, and
then floats away, and vanishes in the rays of the sun. Is what is not too
common for the painter, too common for the poet? Is an idyl in the truest,
warmest, softest colors of the soul, like the "Beautiful Miller's
Daughter," less a work of art than a landscape by Ruysdael? And observe in
these songs how the execution suits the subject; their tone is thoroughly
popular, and reminds many of us, perhaps too much, of the popular songs
collected by Arnim and Brentano in "Des Knaben Wunderhorn." But this could
not be helped. Theocritus could not write his idyls in grand Attic Greek;
he needed the homeliness of the Boeotian dialect. It was the same with
Wilhelm Mueller, who must not be blamed for expressions which now perhaps,
more than formerly, may sound, to fastidious ears, too homely or
commonplace.

His simple and natural conception of nature is shown most beautifully in
the "Wanderer's Songs," and in the "Spring Wreath from the Plauen Valley."
Nowhere do we find a labored thought or a labored word. The lovely spring
world is depicted exactly as it is, but over all is thrown the life and
inspiration of a poet's eye and a poet's mind, which perceives and gives
utterance to what others fa