also for her nature-lyrics
and songs of common life, which are marked by minute realistic detail
and refreshing originality of observation and sentiment. This pious
gentlewoman, usually so maidenly in her reserve, nevertheless expressed
something of the spirit of emancipation in her quiet protest against the
narrow conventional limits of the feminine life. But she would have
recoiled with horror from the reckless propaganda for sex-freedom that
was a part of the Young German campaign, as she also repudiated the
violence of the revolutionists of 1848.--If there is something masculine
in Fraeulein von Droste's firm and plastic touch, there is something
almost feminine in the finely-chiseled lyrics of the Protestant pastor
EDUARD MOeRIKE (1804-1875), whose _Poems_ appeared in the same year
(1838), and blended the folk-song simplicity and melody of an
Eichendorff with the classical form-sense of a Keats. This Suabian
country vicar, the youngest member of the group about Uhland, lived in
the utmost serenity amid the troubles of revolutionary agitation,
devoted to his art, turning the common experiences of every day into
forms of beauty, or reviving with charming naivete the romantic figures
of medieval poetry.

We emerge completely from the quietude and piety of these individualists
when we come to a group of men who were distinctively political poets.
Here we find the direct lyric expression of the revolutionary movement.
The first in the field was ANASTASIUS GRUeN (the pen-name of Count Anton
von Auersperg, 1806-1876). This Austrian nobleman boldly attacked the
reactionary policy of Metternich in his _Saunterings of a Viennese Poet_
(1831); with biting irony he pictures the fate of the Greek patriot
Hypsilantes, broken in health by the "hospitality" of Austrian
prison-fortresses, or describes the all-powerful minister-of-state
enjoying his social triumphs in the palace ball-room, while Austria
stands outside the gate vainly pleading for liberty. In another
collection entitled _Debris_ (1836) there are whole-hearted protests
against the political martyrdom of the best patriots, and the oppressive
despotism under which Italy groaned, with which Gruen contrasts the
blessings of liberty in America.

Anastasius Gruen was the forerunner. The period of the real dominance of
political poetry began with 1840, when a petty official in a Rhenish
village, Nikolaus Becker, electrified Germany with a martial poem, _The
German Rhine_,