reach. Like him, he discovered, or rather
rediscovered, a new land. Like him, he so far outstripped his
forerunners that they sank into oblivion. Like Columbus, who died
without knowing that he had not reached India, the land of his dreams,
but found a new world, he may have departed from this life in the belief
that he had been a measurably successful social reformer when he had
proved to be a great epic poet. Like Columbus, he was succeeded by his
Amerigo Vespucci, after whom his discovery was named. The Columbus of
the village story is the Swiss clergyman Albert Bitzius, better known by
his assumed name as Jeremias Gotthelf; the Amerigo Vespucci is his
contemporary Berthold Auerbach.

The choice of his _nom de guerre_ is significant of Jeremias Gotthelf's
literary activity. He regarded himself as the prophet wailing the misery
of his people, who could be delivered only through the aid of the
Almighty. It never occurred to him to strive for literary fame. He
considered himself as a teacher and preacher purely and simply; in a
measure, as the successor of Pestalozzi, who, in his _Lienhard und
Gertrud_ (1781-1789), had created a sort of pedagogical classic for the
humbler ranks of society; and if there be such a thing in Gotthelf's
make-up as literary influence, it must have emanated from the sage of
Burgdorf and Yverdun. To some extent also Johann Peter Hebel
(1760-1826), justly famed for his Alemannian dialect poems, may have
served him as a model, for Hebel followed an avowedly educational
purpose in the popular tales of his _Schatzkaestlein des rheinischen
Hausfreunds_ ("Treasure Box of the Rhenish Crony"), of which it has been
said that they outweigh tons of novels.

Gotthelf's intention was twofold: to champion the cause of the rustic
yeomanry in the threatening of its peculiar existence--for the radical
spirit of the times was already seizing and preying upon the hallowed
customs of the peasantry's life--and to fight against certain inveterate
vices of the rural population itself that seemed to be indigenous to the
soil. As the first great social writer of the German tongue, he is not
content to make the rich answerable for existing conditions, but labors
with all earnestness to educate the lower classes toward self-help. At
first he appeared as an uncommonly energetic, conservative, polemic
author in whose views the religious, basis of life and genuine moral
worth coincided with the traditional character of the