ts with a tendency toward Romance art.
However, both hexameter or distich and sonnet have become, in Germany,
pure literary forms of composition. While in Italy the sonnet is still
sung, we are filled with astonishment that Brahms should have set to
music a distich--_Anacreon_. Numerous other forms, taken up
principally by the Romantic school and the closely related "Exotic
School," have remained mere literary playthings. For a certain length
of time the ghasel seemed likely to be adopted as a shell to contain
scattered thoughts, wittily arranged, or (almost exclusively by
Platen) also for mood-pictures; but without doubt the undeservedly
great success of Friedrich von Bodenstedt's _Mirza Schaffy_ has cast
permanent discredit on this form. The favorite stanza of Schiller is
only one of the numerous strophe forms of our narrative or reflective
lyric; it has never attained an "ethos" peculiar to itself.
Incidentally, the French alexandrines were the fashion for a short
time after Victor Hugo's revival of them was revivified by Ferdinand
Freiligrath, and were recently used with variations by Carl Spitteler
(which, however, he denies) as a foundation for his epic poems. So,
too, the "Old German rhymed verse" after the manner of Hans Sachs,
enjoyed a short popularity; and one saw virtuosos playing with the
canzone or the makame. On the whole, however, German lyric poetry is
rather made up of simple formations in the style of the folk-song,
especially since the important rhythmic transformation of this
material by Heine created new possibilities for accommodating the
inner form to new subject matter without conspicuously changing the
outer form. For two great simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been
predominant in protecting our lyric poetry from unfruitful
artificiality; the influence of the folk-song and the connection with
music have kept it more full of vital energy than the too literary
lyric poetry of the French, and richer in variety than the too
cultivated lyric of the English. Whoever shut the door on the
influences spoken of, as did Franz Grillparzer or Hebbel, and, in a
different way, Annette von Droste-Huelshoff or Heinrich Leuthold, at
the same time nullified a good part of his efficiency.

The drama almost exclusively assumed a foreign, though kindred, form
as a garb for the more elevated styles of composition: namely, the
blank verse of the English stage, which Lessing's _Nathan the Wise_
had popularized a