the “Old German rhymed verse” after the manner of Hans Sachs, enjoyed a short popularity; and one saw virtuosos playing with the canzone or the makame.  On the whole, however, German lyric poetry is rather made up of simple formations in the style of the folk-song, especially since the important rhythmic transformation of this material by Heine created new possibilities for accommodating the inner form to new subject matter without conspicuously changing the outer form.  For two great simplifying factors have, since Goethe, been predominant in protecting our lyric poetry from unfruitful artificiality; the influence of the folk-song and the connection with music have kept it more full of vital energy than the too literary lyric poetry of the French, and richer in variety than the too cultivated lyric of the English.  Whoever shut the door on the influences spoken of, as did Franz Grillparzer or Hebbel, and, in a different way, Annette von Droste-Huelshoff or Heinrich Leuthold, at the same time nullified a good part of his efficiency.

The drama almost exclusively assumed a foreign, though kindred, form as a garb for the more elevated styles of composition:  namely, the blank verse of the English stage, which Lessing’s Nathan the Wise had popularized and A.W.  Schlegel’s Shakespeare had rendered omnipotent, and which Schiller forced upon his successors.  The Romanticists, by playing unsuccessfully with different forms, as in Ludwig Tieck’s Octavianus, or Immerman’s Alexis, or by adopting pure antique or Spanish metres, attempted in vain to free themselves from the restraint of form, the great danger of which consisted in its similarity to common-place sentence construction, so that the verse ran the risk either of becoming prosaic, or else, in trying forcibly to avoid this, of growing bombastic.  An escape was provided by inserting, in moments of emotion, a metre of a more lyrical quality into the uniform structure of the usual vehicle of dramatic dialogue, particularly when partaking of the nature of a monologue; as Goethe did, for example, in the “Song of the Fates” in Iphigenia, that most metrically perfect of all German dramatic poems, and as Schiller continued to do with increased boldness in the songs introduced into Mary Stuart.  Perhaps the greatest perfection in such use of the principle of the “free rhythm” as applied to the drama, was reached by Franz Grillparzer in the Golden Fleece, on the model of certain fragments by Goethe, such as the Prometheus.  On the other hand, the interesting experiments in the Bride of Messina are of more importance for the development of the opera into a work of art complete in itself, than for that of the drama.  In general, however, it is to be remarked as a peculiarity of modern German drama, that it seeks to escape from monotony, which the French classical theatre hardly ever succeeded in avoiding, by calling in the aid of the other arts.