life and feeling for everything,—­the open heart, the open arms of love; and every star and every flower are human in his sight....  In other, better words,—­the evening-glow of a lovely, peaceful soul slumbers upon all the hills he bids arise; for the flowers of poetry he substitutes the flower-goddess Poetry herself; he sets to his lips the Swiss Alp-horn of youthful longing and joy, while pointing with the other hand to the sunset-gleam of the lofty glaciers, and dissolved in prayer, as the sound of the chapel-bells is flung down from the mountains.”

Contrast this somewhat confused rhapsody with the clear, precise, yet genial words wherewith Goethe welcomed the new poet.  He instantly seized, weighed in the fine balance of his ordered mind, and valued with nice discrimination, those qualities of Hebel’s genius which had but stirred the splendid chaos of Richter with an emotion of vague delight.  “The author of these poems,” says he, in the Jena “Literaturzeitung,” (1804,) “is about to achieve a place of his own on the German Parnassus.  His talent manifests itself in two opposite directions.  On the one hand, he observes with a fresh, cheerful glance those objects of Nature which express their life in positive existence, in growth and in motion, (objects which we are accustomed to call lifeless,) and thereby approaches the field of descriptive poetry; yet he succeeds, by his happy personifications, in lifting his pictures to a loftier plane of Art.  On the other hand, he inclines to the didactic and the allegorical; but here, also, the same power of personification comes to his aid, and as, in the one case, he finds a soul for his bodies, so, in the other, he finds a body for his souls.  As the ancient poets, and others who have been developed through a plastic sentiment for Art, introduce loftier spirits, related to the gods,—­such as nymphs, dryads, and hamadryads,—­in the place of rocks, fountains, and trees:  so the author transforms these objects into peasants, and countrifies [verbauert] the universe in the most naive, quaint, and genial manner, until the landscape, in which we nevertheless always recognize the human figure, seems to become one with man in the cheerful enchantment exercised upon our fancy.”

This is entirely correct, as a poetic characterization.  Hebel, however, possesses the additional merit—­no slight one, either—­of giving faithful expression to the thoughts, emotions, and passions of the simple people among whom his childhood was passed.  The hearty native kindness, the tenderness, hidden under a rough exterior, the lively, droll, unformed fancy, the timidity and the boldness of love, the tendency to yield to temptation, and the unfeigned piety of the inhabitants of the Black Forest, are all reproduced in his poems.  To say that they teach, more or less directly, a wholesome morality, is but indifferent praise; for morality is the cheap veneering wherewith would-be poets attempt to conceal the lack of the true faculty.  We prefer to let our readers judge for themselves concerning this feature of Hebel’s poetry.