Spanish
romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated
motives from all these varied sources. His true field, however, was the
ballad, as Tieck's was the popular tale; and many of Uhland's ballads are
favourites with English readers, through excellent translations. Sarah
Austin's version of one of them is widely familiar:

"Many a year is in its grave
Since I crossed this restless wave," etc.

Longfellow translated three: "The Black Knight," "The Luck of Edenhall,"
and "The Castle by the Sea." It is to be feared that the last-named
belongs to what Scherer calls that "trivial kind of romanticism, full of
sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles
and golden crowns, kings' daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers,
monks, and nuns play a great part." But it has a haunting beauty, and a
dreamy melody like Goethe's "Es war ein Koenig in Thule." The mocking
Heine, who stigmatises Fouque's knights as combinations of iron and
sentimentality, complains that in Uhland's writings too "the naive, rude,
powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised
fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental
melancholy. . . . The women in Uhland's poems are only beautiful
shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears
in their eyes, _i.e._, tears which lack salt. If we compare Uhland's
knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the
former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with
flowers, instead of flesh and bones. Hence Uhland's knights are more
pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron
trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers."

Upon the whole it must be concluded that this second invasion of England
by German romance, in the twenties and early thirties of the nineteenth
century, made a lesser impression than the first irruption in, say, 1795
to 1810, in the days of Buerger and "Goetz," and "The Robbers," and Monk
Lewis and the youthful Scott. And the reason is not far to seek. The
newcomers found England in possession of a native romanticism of a very
robust type, by the side of which the imported article showed like a
delicate exotic. Carlyle affirms that Madame de Stael's book was the
precursor of whatever acquaintance with German literature exists in
England. He himself worked valiantly to extend that acquaintanc