tors was:--

"Und lasst mir doch mein volles Glass,
Und lasst mir meinen guten Spass,
Mit unsrer schlechten Zeit!
Wer bei dem Weine singt und lacht,
Den thut, ihr Herrn, nicht in die Acht!
Ein Kind ist Froehligkeit."(15)

Wilhelm Mueller evidently felt that when words are not deeds, or do not
lead to deeds, silence is more worthy of a man than speech. He never
became a political poet, at least never in his own country. But when the
rising of the Greeks appealed to those human sympathies of Christian
nations which can never be quite extinguished, and when here, too, the
faint-hearted policy of the great powers played and bargained over the
great events in the east of Europe instead of trusting to those principles
which alone can secure the true and lasting well-being of states, as well
as of individuals, then the long accumulated wrath of the poet and of the
man burst forth and found utterance in the songs on the Greek war of
independence. Human, Christian, political, and classical sympathies
stirred his heart, and breathed that life into his poems, which most of
them still possess. It is astonishing how a young man in a small isolated
town like Dessau, almost shut out from intercourse with the great world,
could have followed step by step the events of the Greek revolution,
seizing on all the right, the beauty, the grandeur of the struggle, making
himself intimately acquainted with the dominant characters, whilst he at
the same time mastered the peculiar local coloring of the passing events.
Wilhelm Mueller was not only a poet, but he was intimately acquainted with
classic antiquity. He _knew_ the Greeks and the Romans. And just as during
his stay in Rome he recognized at all points the old in what was new, and
everywhere sought to find what was eternal in the eternal city, so now
with him the modern Greeks were inseparably joined with the ancient. A
knowledge of the modern Greek language appeared to him the natural
completion of the study of old Greek; and it was his acquaintance with the
popular songs of modern as well as of ancient Hellas that gave the color
which imparted such a vivid expression of truth and naturalness to his own
Greek songs. It was thus that the "Griechen Lieder" arose, which appeared
in separate but rapid numbers, and found great favor with the people. But
even these "Griechen Lieder" caused anxiety to the paternal governments of
those days:--

"Ruh und Friede will Europa--warum hast du sie g