s, while it fixes, the impression an author
makes upon his generation--cannot seriously elevate or depress it. In
life he stood so far aloof from the fashions of the day, that all his
successes were permanent achievements.

He was born on the 16th of May, 1788, in Schweinfurt, a pleasant old
town in Bavaria, near the baths of Kissingen. As a student he visited
Jena, where he distinguished himself by his devotion to philological and
literary studies. For some years a private tutor, in 1815 he became
connected with the _Morgenblatt_, published by Cotta, in Stuttgart. The
year 1818 he spent in Italy. Soon after his return, he married, and
established himself in Coburg, of which place, I believe, his wife was a
native. Here he occupied himself ostensibly as a teacher, but in reality
with an enthusiastic and untiring study of the Oriental languages and
literature. Twice he was called away by appointments which were the
result of his growing fame as poet and scholar,--the first time in 1826,
when he was made Professor of the Oriental Languages at the University
of Erlangen; and again in 1840, when he was appointed to a similar place
in the University of Berlin, with the title of Privy Councillor. Both
these posts were uncongenial to his nature. Though so competent to fill
them, he discharged his duties reluctantly and with a certain
impatience; and probably there were few more joyous moments of his life
than when, in 1849, he was allowed to retire permanently to the pastoral
seclusion of his little property at Neuses, a suburb of Coburg.

One of his German critics remarks that the poem in which he celebrates
his release embodies a nearer approach to passion than all his Oriental
songs of love, sorrow, or wine. It is a joyous dithyrambic, which,
despite its artful and semi-impossible metre, must have been the
swiftly-worded expression of a genuine feeling. Let me attempt to
translate the first stanza:--

"Out of the dust of the
Town o' the king,
Into the lust of the
Green of spring,--
Forth from the noises of
Streets and walls,
Unto the voices of
Waterfalls,--
He who presently
Flies is blest:
Fate thus pleasantly
Makes my nest!"[B]

The quaint old residence at Neuses thus early became, and for nearly
half a century continued to be, the poet's home. No desire to visit the
Orient--the native land of his brain--seems to have disturbed him.
Possibly the Italian journey w