Heine says that Fouque's Sigurd the Serpent Slayer has the courage of a
hundred lions and the sense of two asses. But Fouque's "Undine" (1811)
is in its way a masterpiece and a classic. This story of the lovely
water-sprite, who received a soul when she fell in love with the knight,
and with a soul, a knowledge of human sorrow, has a slight resemblance to
the conception of Hawthorne's "Marble Faun." Coleridge was greatly
fascinated by it. He read the original several times, and once the
American translation, printed at Philadelphia. He said that it was
beyond Scott, and that Undine resembled Shakspere's Caliban in being a
literal _creation_.

But in general Fouque's chivalry romances, when compared with Scott's,
have much less vigour, variety, and dramatic force, though a higher
spirituality and a softer sentiment. The Waverley novels are solid with
a right materialistic treatment. It was Scott's endeavour to make the
Middle Ages real. The people are there, as well as chevaliers and their
ladies. The history of the times is there. But in Fouque the Middle
Ages become even more unreal, fairy-like, fantastic than they are in our
imaginations. There is nothing but tourneying, love-making, and
enchantment. Compare the rumour of the Crusades and Richard the Lion
Heart in "Der Zauberring" with the stalwart flesh-and-blood figures in
"Ivanhoe" and "The Talisman." A wavering moonshine lies all over the
world of the Fouque romances, like the magic light which illumines the
Druda's castle in "Der Zauberring," on whose battlements grow tall white
flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the
perpetual revolution of golden wheels. "On the romantic side," wrote
Richter, in his review of "L'Allemagne" in the _Heidelberg Jahrbuecher_
for 1815, "we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us;
for the Briton--to whom nothing is so poetical as the common
weal--requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age
of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the
transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured
butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something."

Another _Spaetromantiker_ who has penetrated to the English literary
consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of
the romantic school. Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse
sagas, the "Nibelungenlied" and German hero legends, the