han the rest of humankind.

Not suddenly, then, did rural poetry rise into being; but while its
origin harks back to remote antiquity it has found its final form only
during the last century. In this its last, as well as its most vigorous,
offshoot, it presents itself as the village story--as we shall term it
for brevity's sake--which has won a permanent place in literature by the
side of its older brothers and sisters, and has even entirely driven out
the fanciful pastoral or village idyl of old.

The village story was bound to come in the nineteenth century, even if
there had been no beginnings of it in earlier times, and even if it did
not correspond to a deep-rooted general sentiment. The eighteenth
century had allowed the Third Estate to gain a firm foothold in the
domain of dignified letters; the catholicity of the nineteenth admitted
the laborer and the proletarian. It would have been passing strange if
the rustic alone had been denied the privilege. An especially hearty
welcome was accorded to the writings of the first representatives of the
new species. Internationalism, due to increased traffic, advanced with
unparalleled strides in the third and fourth decades. The seclusion of
rural life seemed to remain the quiet and unshakable realm of
patriarchal virtue and venerable tradition. The political skies were
overcast with the thunder clouds of approaching revolutions; France had
just passed through another violent upheaval. Village conditions seemed
to offer a veritable haven of refuge. The pristine artlessness of the
peasant's intellectual, moral, and emotional life furnished a wholesome
antidote to the morbid hyperculture of dying romanticism, the
controversies and polemics of Young Germany, and the self-adulation of
the society of the salons. Neither could the exotic, ethnographic, and
adventure narratives in the manner of Sealsfield, at first
enthusiastically received, satisfy the taste of the reading public for
any length of time--at best, these novels supplanted one fashion by
another, if, indeed, they did not drive out Satan by means of Beelzebub.
And was it wise to roam so far afield when the real good was so close at
hand? Why cross oceans when the land of promise lay right before one's
doors? All that was needed was the poet discoverer.

The Columbus of this new world shared the fate of the great Genoese in
more than one respect. Like him, he set out in quest of shores that he
was destined never to