had brought fresh breezes into the
stagnation of political life; and though they soon were stilled again,
the men who had breathed that air ceased to be the dreamers of dreams
that the romantic poets had been. They were conscious of a mission,
and became the robust heralds of a larger and a freer time.

Freiligrath was a schoolmaster's son; he was born at Detmold on June
17th, 1810, and much against his private inclinations, he was sent in
his sixteenth year to an uncle in Soest to prepare himself for a
mercantile career. The death of his father threw him upon his own
resources, and he took a position in an Amsterdam bank. Here the
inspiration of the sea widened the range of his poetic fancy. To
Chamisso is due the credit of introducing the poet to the general
public through the pages of the Musenalmanach. This was in 1835. In
1838 appeared the first volume of his poems, and it won instant and
unusual favor; Gutzkow called him the German Hugo. With this
encouragement Freiligrath definitely abandoned mercantile life. In
1841 he married. At the suggestion of Alexander von Humboldt, the King
of Prussia granted him a royal pension; and as no conditions were
attached, it was accepted. This was a bitter disappointment to the
ardent revolutionary poets, who had counted Freiligrath as one of
themselves; but the turbulent times which preceded the revolution soon
forced him into an open declaration of principles, and although he had
said in one of his poems that the poet was above all party, in 1844,
influenced by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, he resigned his pension,
announced his position, and in May published a volume of revolutionary
poems entitled 'Mein Glaubensbekenntniss' (My Confession of Faith).
This book created the wildest enthusiasm, and placed its author at
once in the front rank of the people's partisans. He fled to Brussels,
and in 1846 published under the title of 'Ca Ira' six new songs, which
were a trumpet-call to revolution. The poet deemed it prudent to
retire to London, and he was about to accept an invitation from
Longfellow to cross the ocean when the revolution broke out, and he
returned to Duesseldorf to put himself at the head of the democratic
party on the Rhine. But he was a poet and not a leader, and he
indiscreetly exposed himself to arrest by an inflammatory poem, 'Die
Todten an die Lebenden' (The Dead to the Living). The jury however
acquitted him, and he at once assumed the management of the New
Rh