The Death of Goethe.  By Fritz Fleischer

The Heathrose.  By K. Kogler

Prometheus.  By Titian

The Fisherman and the Mermaid.  By Georg Papperitz

Hermann’s Parents in the Doorway of the Tavern. 
  By Ludwig Richter

Hermann hands to Dorothea the Linen for the Emigrants. 
  By Ludwig Richter

The Mother defending Hermann.  By Ludwig Richter

Mother and Son.  By Ludwig Richter

The Emigrants in the Village.  By Ludwig Richter

The Parson and the Apothecary watch Dorothea.  By Ludwig Richter

Hermann and Dorothea meet at the Fountain.  By Ludwig Richter

Hermann and Dorothea under the Pear tree.  By Ludwig Richter

The Betrothal.  By Ludwig Richter

Iphigenia.  By Ansehn Feuerbach

The Meeting of Orestes, Iphigenia, and Pylades. 
  By Angelica, Kauffmann

Iphigenia.  By Max Nonnenbruch

Faust and Mephistopheles.  By Liezen-Mayer

Margaret.  By Wilhelm von Kaulbach

Faust and Margaret.  By Carl Becker

Faust and Margaret in the Garden.  By Liezen-Mayer

The Death of Valentine.  By Franz Simm

Margaret’s Downfall.  By Wilhelm von Kaulbach

EDITOR’S PREFACE

It is surprising how little the English-speaking world knows of German literature of the nineteenth century.  Goethe and Schiller found their herald in Carlyle; Fichte’s idealistic philosophy helped to mold Emerson’s view of life; Amadeus Hoffmann influenced Poe; Uhland and Heine reverberate in Longfellow; Sudermann and Hauptmann appear in the repertory of London and New York theatres—­these brief statements include nearly all the names which to the cultivated Englishman and American of to-day stand for German literature.

The German classics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been planned to correct this narrow and inadequate view.  Here for the first time English readers will find a panorama of the whole of German literature from Goethe to the present day; here for the first time they will find the most representative writers of each period brought together and exhibited by their most representative works; here for the first time an opportunity will be offered to form a just conception of the truly remarkable literary achievements of Germany during the last hundred years.

For it is a grave mistake to assume, as has been assumed only too often, that, after the great epoch of Classicism and Romanticism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Germany produced but little of universal significance, or that, after Goethe and Heine, there were but few Germans worthy to be mentioned side by side with the great writers of other European countries.  True, there is no German Tolstoy, no German Ibsen,