er.
Johann Heinrich Voss.
Friedrich Leopold und Christian Grafen zu Stollberg.
Das Siebengestirn der Dichter des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,--
1. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.
2. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.
3. Christoph Martin Wieland.
4. Johann Gottfried von Herder.
5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
6. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
7. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter.

II. OLD GERMAN LOVE-SONGS.(8)

Seven hundred years ago! What a long time it seems! Philip Augustus, King
of France; Henry II., King of England; Frederic I., the famous Barbarossa,
Emperor of Germany! When we read of their times, the times of the
Crusades, we feel as the Greeks felt when reading of the War of Troy. We
listen, we admire, but we do not compare the heroes of St. Jean d'Acre
with the great generals of the nineteenth century. They seem a different
race of men from those who are now living, and poetry and tradition have
lent to their royal frames such colossal proportions that we hardly dare
to criticise the legendary history of their chivalrous achievements. It
was a time of heroes, of saints, of martyrs, of miracles! Thomas a Becket
was murdered at Canterbury, but for more than three hundred years his name
lived on, and his bones were working miracles, and his soul seemed as it
were embodied and petrified in the lofty pillars that surround the spot of
his martyrdom. Abelard was persecuted and imprisoned, but his spirit
revived in the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and the shrine of
Abelard and Heloise in the Pere La Chaise is still decorated every year
with garlands of _immortelles_. Barbarossa was drowned in the same river
in which Alexander the Great had bathed his royal limbs, but his fame
lived on in every cottage of Germany, and the peasant near the Kyffhaeuser
still believes that some day the mighty Emperor will awake from his long
slumber, and rouse the people of Germany from their fatal dreams. We dare
not hold communion with such stately heroes as Frederick the Red-beard and
Richard the Lion-heart; they seem half to belong to the realm of fable. We
feel from our very school-days as if we could shake hands with a
Themistocles and sit down in the company of a Julius Caesar, but we are
awed by the presence of those tall and silent knights, with their hands
folded and their legs crossed, as we see them reposing in full armor on
the tombs of our cathedrals.

And yet, however different in all other respects, these men,