-1835), of aristocratic French
descent, and using all the familiar romantic forms and motives, was yet
thoroughly democratic and prophetically modern in his unalloyed sympathy
with the impoverished victims of the social order. It was something new
for German poetry to find inspiration in the wrath of a beggar who
cannot pay his dog-tax, the sardonic piety of an old widow reduced to
penury by the exactions of the "gracious prince," or the laborious
resignation of an aged washerwoman.--The Silesian nobleman JOSEPH VON
EICHENDORFF (1788-1857), Prussian officer and civil official, was a
consistent conservative in his political attitude, a pious Catholic, and
a romanticist in every fibre of his poetic soul. His lyrics are the
purest echoes of folk-song and folk-lore, and the simplicity and
genuineness of his art give an undying charm to his songs of idyllic
meadows and woodlands, post-chaises, carefree wanderers, and lovely
maidens in picturesque settings; all suffused with gentle yearning and
melting into soft melody. Eichendorff's patriotism was of the
traditional type, echoing faintly the battle-hymns of the War of
Liberation. For the great liberal movement of the thirties and forties
he had neither sympathy nor comprehension.--FRIEDRICH RUeCKERT
(1788-1866), endowed with a fatal facility of lyric expression, a
virtuoso for whom no _tour-de-force_ was too difficult, lived most of
his life aloof from the political and social movements of his time. In
his youth his _Sonnets in Armor_ had done sturdy service in the national
awakening against Napoleon, but his maturer years were devoted to
domestic and academic interests. Every impression of his life, whether
deep or fleeting, was material for a poem or a cycle. He handled with
consummate skill the odd or complicated metres of eastern and southern
lyric forms, and he was most versatile as a translator of foreign
poetry, ancient and modern, occidental and oriental. His unusual formal
talent and mastery of language were a constant temptation to rapid and
superficial versifying; but there are in the vast mass of his production
many genuine poems of great beauty.

Two other poets of quite distinctive quality stood aloof from the
political interests of the time. The talented Westphalian Catholic
poetess ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HUeLSHOFF (1797-1848) has a place apart in her
generation, not only for the fine religious poems of her _Christian
Year_ (similar in plan to Keble's cycle), but