e riddles of nature more earnestly than
the riddles of humanity. Among human beings, however, his favorite is
the gentle St. Francis of Assisi, to whom he has devoted a splendid
little book.

Hesse was born in 1877 at Calw in Wuerttemberg; it is his own youth that
he describes in the novel _On the Rack_. After fleeing from the
Theological Seminary at Moulbronn he became a machinist; then he worked
in a bookstore at Basel, where he found opportunity to study at the
University. He spent a few years at Munich, and finally made
Switzerland his home by establishing himself in the neighborhood of
Bern. In respect to literary relations he had even before this acquired
a certain right to be called a Swiss; for his work may be regarded as a
continuation of the line of development that runs from Jean Paul to
Gottfried Keller. There is a kind of resurrection of Jean Paul in the
wonderful descriptions of nature, the dreams of universal love and
natural piety, which we find in Hesse's first great novel _Peter
Camenzind_ (1904); no writer since Jean Paul has bestowed such eloquent
praise upon the clouds:

Show me in all the wide world the man who knows the clouds better and
loves them more than I do! Or show me the thing in the world that is
more splendid than the clouds! They are playthings and balm for the
eyes, they are a blessing and divine gift, they are wrath and
omnipotent death. They are frail, tender, and peaceful, like the souls
of the newly born; they are beautiful, opulent, and lavish, like good
angels; they are dark, unescapable, and pitiless, like the messengers
of death. They hover in silvery thin expanse, they sail laughingly
white with a golden rim, they stand at rest in yellow, red, and bluish
tints; they creep up slowly and darkly threatening like murderers, they
rush with a headlong roar like mad horsemen, they hang sad and pensive
at equal heights like melancholy hermits. They have the forms of
blessed isles and the forms of blessing angels; they are like
threatening hands, fluttering sails, a flight of cranes. They float
between God's heaven and the poor earth as fair symbols of all human
longings, akin to both--dreams of the earth, in which her sullied soul
flies to the embrace of the pure heaven. They are the eternal symbol of
all wandering, all seeking, desiring, all homesickness. And as they
hang timidly and yearningly and persistently between earth and heaven,
so the souls of men hang timidly and yearning