Prelate, with a seat in the Upper House.  His friends were disappointed, that, with his readiness and fluent power of speech, he took so little part in the legislative proceedings.  To one who reproached him for this timidity he naively wrote,—­“Oh, you have a right to talk:  you are the son of Pastor N. in X. Before you were twelve years old, you heard yourself called Mr. Gottlieb; and when you went with your father down the street, and the judge or a notary met you, they took off their hats, you waiting for your father to return the greeting, before you even lifted your cap.  But I, as you well know, grew up as the son of a poor widow in Hausen; and when I accompanied my mother to Schopfheim or Basle, and we happened to meet a notary, she commanded, ’Peter, jerk your cap off, there’s a gentleman!’—­but when the judge or the counsellor appeared, she called out to me, when they were twenty paces off, ’Peter, stand still where you are, and off with your cap quick, the Lord Judge is comin’!’ Now you can easily imagine how I feel, when I recall those times,—­and I recall them often,—­sitting in the Chamber among Barons, Counsellors of State, Ministers, and Generals, with Counts and Princes of the reigning House before me.”  Hebel may have felt that rank is but the guinea-stamp, but he never would have dared to speak it out with the defiant independence of Burns.  Socially, however, he was thoroughly democratic in his tastes; and his chief objection to accepting the dignity of Prelate was the fear that it might restrict his intercourse with humbler friends.

His ambition appears to have been mainly confined to his theological labors, and he never could have dreamed that his after-fame was to rest upon a few poems in a rough mountain-dialect, written to beguile his intense longing for the wild scenery of his early home.  After his transfer to Carlsruhe, he remained several years absent from the Black Forest; and the pictures of its dark hills, its secluded valleys, and their rude, warm-hearted, and unsophisticated inhabitants, became more and more fresh and lively in his memory.  Distance and absence turned the quaint dialect to music, and out of this mild home-sickness grew the Alemannic poems.  A healthy oyster never produces a pearl.

These poems, written in the years 1801 and 1802, were at first circulated in manuscript among the author’s friends.  He resisted the proposal to collect and publish them, until the prospect of pecuniary advantage decided him to issue an anonymous edition.  The success of the experiment was so positive that in the course of five years four editions appeared,—­a great deal for those days.  Not only among his native Alemanni, and in Baden and Wuertemberg, where the dialect was more easily understood, but from all parts of Germany, from poets and scholars, came messages of praise and appreciation.  Jean Paul (Richter) was one of Hebel’s first and warmest admirers.  “Our Alemannic poet,” he wrote, “has