d a day
too late on the field of Waterloo. The somewhat fanciful title by no
means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that
in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their
poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement. After
him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie
outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.

Eichendorff is a thorough _pleinairiste_, filled with the atmosphere
of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart
from its landscape. His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near
Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the
ultimate background of all his nature-poetry. Here must be localized
the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle.
Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the
splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong
and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a
Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought
comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise
to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German
literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's
beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see
how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature
into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that
youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued
to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad,
deep, manly piety.

Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by
Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count
Otto von Loeben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than
mediocre ability. But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant
accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into
German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in--an effect of
perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar
lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of
the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony
tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such
surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a
permanent part of the musical life of the nation. _The Broken
Ring_ has passed into a folk-song,