country yeomanry.
A more thorough examination revealed to his readers an original epic
talent of stupendous powers. He was indeed eminently fitted to be an
educator and reformer among his flock by his own nobility of character,
his keen knowledge and sane judgment of the people's real needs and
wants, his warm feeling, and his unexcelled insight into the peasant's
inner life. Beyond that, however, he was gifted with exuberant poetic
imagination and creative power, with an intuitive knowledge of the
subtlest workings of the emotional life, and a veritable genius for
finding the critical moments in an individual existence.

So it came about that the poet triumphed over the social reformer, in
spite of himself; and while in his own parish, at Luetzelflueh in the
Canton of Berne--where he was installed as minister of the Gospel in
1832 after having spent some time there as a vicar--he is remembered to
this day for his self-sacrificing activity in every walk of life, the
world at large knows him only as one of the great prose writers of
Germany in the nineteenth century. His first work, _Bauernspiegel_ ("The
Peasants' Mirror"), was published in 1836, when he was thirty-nine years
old. From that time on until his death in 1854, his productivity was
most marvelous. _The Peasants' Mirror_ is the first village story that
deserves the name; here, for the first time, the world of the peasant
was presented as a distinct world by itself.[1] It is at the same time
one of the earliest, as well as the most splendid, products of realistic
art; and, considered in connection with his later writings, must be
regarded as his creed and program. For the motives of the several
chapters reappear later, worked out into complete books, and thus both
_Uli der Knecht_ ("Uli, the Farmhand," 1841) and _Uli der Paechter_
("Uli, the Tenant," 1849) are foreshadowed here.

As a literary artist Gotthelf shows barely any progress in his whole
career, and intentionally so. Few writers of note have been so perfectly
indifferent to matters of form. The same Gottfried Keller who calls
Gotthelf "without exception the greatest epic genius that has lived in a
long time, or perhaps will live for a long time to come," characterizes
him thus as to his style: "With his strong, sharp spade he will dig out
a large piece of soil, load it on his literary wheelbarrow, and to the
accompaniment of strong language upset it before our feet; good garden
soil, grass, flowers