ght and instruct thee. That which is false in philology thou
wilt attribute to poetic license, and where the poetry is deficient,
thou wilt give the blame to philology."

The critics who charge Rueckert with never having produced "a whole,"
have certainly forgotten one of his works,--"The Wisdom of the Brahmin,
a Didactic Poem, in Fragments." The title somewhat describes its
character. The "fragments" are couplets, in iambic hexameter, each one
generally complete in itself, yet grouped in sections by some connecting
thought, after the manner of the stanzas of Tennyson's "In Memoriam."
There are more than _six thousand_ couplets, in all, divided into
twenty books,--the whole forming a mass of poetic wisdom, coupled with
such amazing wealth of illustration, that this one volume, if
sufficiently diluted, would make several thousand "Proverbial
Philosophies." It is not a book to read continuously, but one which, I
should imagine, no educated German could live without possessing. I
never open its pages without the certainty of refreshment. Its tone is
quietistic, as might readily be conjectured, but it is the calm of
serene reflection, not of indifference. No work which Rueckert ever wrote
so strongly illustrates the incessant activity of his mind. Half of
these six thousand couplets are terse and pithy enough for proverbs, and
their construction would have sufficed for the lifetime of many poets.

With the exception of "Kaiser Barbarossa," and two or three other
ballads, the amatory poems of Rueckert have attained the widest
popularity among his countrymen. Many of the love-songs have been set to
music by Mendelssohn and other composers. Their melody is of that
subtile, delicate quality which excites a musician's fancy, suggesting
the tones to which the words should be wedded. Precisely for this reason
they are most difficult to translate. The first stanza may, in most
cases, be tolerably reproduced; but as it usually contains a refrain,
which is repeated to a constantly varied rhyme, throughout the whole
song or poem, the labor at first becomes desperate, and then impossible.
An example (the original of which I possess, in the author's manuscript)
will best illustrate this particular difficulty. Here the metre and the
order of rhyme have been strictly preserved, except in the first and
third lines.

"He came to meet me
In rain and thunder;
My heart 'gan beating
In timid wonder:
Could I guess whethe