dge of the
village, in the midst of a meadow. Round about tower the mountains; the
gleaming glacier of Damma throws its light in through the window panes.
The valley is filled with a great stillness. In the house five
children, my children, live their untroubled lives, and my wife guards
them well, with her gentle and skilful hand to lead, and her
affectionate patience to understand her husband. In this, my mountain
home, my life has found its haven. I hope to dwell there until I must
move into the last resting place of my career; I hope to work, and I
hope to attain to high and beautiful things; for I hear the bells of
poetry mightily reverberating from my mountains, marvelous, richly
harmonious voices; and perhaps I shall one day succeed in catching
these tones in their clearest purity. Perhaps! There is hope; and hope
is life!

The strenuous effort alluded to in these words, the great
all-conquering achievement, the master chime which peals from the
heights, has indeed not yet attained fulfillment. One might say of the
work of Zahn as of the bell of Gerhart Hauptmann's bell-founder, "In
the valley it vibrates, not on the heights." We find neither great
problems of humanity and civilization nor real men of the heights. On
the contrary, these "heroes of every day" are dwellers in the valley,
harsh and hard as the walls of granite which narrow their horizon; and
if the author puts into these rude vessels something of his own
delicacy of feeling, as he attributes to Stephen the Smith appreciation
of the little Roman bronze figures which the trader has brought up from
Italy, such ennobling ingredients can sometimes enter only at the
expense of consistency of characterization.

A more primitive power is manifest in the other Swiss, Jakob Schaffner,
who in still higher degree than Zahn deserves to be called a self-made
man. Schaffner, who was born in 1875 at Basel, belongs with Hans Sachs
and Jakob Boehme among the poetic shoemakers. His immature first novel,
_Wanderings_ (1905), has its best scenes in the workshop, and his later
masterpiece, _Konrad Pilater_ (1910), is another story of a fantastic
journeyman shoemaker. As the author himself worked his way up with iron
energy to culture and independence, so all of his creations are endowed
with something of a vaulting ambition, which is not depreciated by
being treated with a slight measure of irony. His _Jack Heaven-High_
(1909) is a philosophizing journeyman who from ev