The Alemannic dialect, we have said, is at first harsh to the ear.  It requires, indeed, not a little practice, to perceive its especial beauties; since these consist in certain quaint, playful inflections and elisions, which, like the speech of children, have a fresh, natural, simple charm of their own.  The changes of pronunciation, in German words, are curious. K becomes a light guttural ch, and a great number of monosyllabic words—­especially those ending in ut and ueh—­receive a peculiar twist from the introduction of e or ei:  as gut, frueh, which become guet, frueeih.  This seems to be a characteristic feature of the South-German dialects, though in none is it so pronounced as in the Alemannic.  The change of ist into isch, hast into hesch, ich into i, dich into de, etc., is much more widely spread, among the peasantry, and is readily learned, even by the foreign reader.  But a good German scholar would be somewhat puzzled by the consolidation of several abbreviated words into a single one, which occurs in almost every Alemannic sentence:  for instance, in woni he would have some difficulty in recognizing wo ich; sagene does not suggest sage ihnen, nor uffeme, auf einem.

These singularities of the dialect render the translation of Hebel’s poems into a foreign language a work of great difficulty.  In the absence of any English dialect which possesses corresponding features, the peculiar quaintness and raciness which they confer must inevitably be lost.  Fresh, wild, and lovely as the Schwarzwald heather, they are equally apt to die in transplanting.  How much they lose by being converted into classical German was so evident to us (fancy, “Scots who have with Wallace bled"!) that we at first shrank from the experiment of reproducing them in a language still farther removed from the original.  Certainly, classical English would not answer; the individual soul of the poems could never be recognized in such a garb.  The tongue of Burns can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated with the coarse and the farcical—­Lowell’s little poem of “’Zekel’s Courtship” being the single exception—­that it seems hardly adapted to the simple and tender fancies of Hebel.  Like the comedian whose one serious attempt at tragic acting was greeted with roars of laughter, as an admirable burlesque, the reader might, in such a case, persist in seeing fun where sentiment was intended.