Eichendorff’s patriotism was of the traditional type, echoing faintly the battle-hymns of the War of Liberation.  For the great liberal movement of the thirties and forties he had neither sympathy nor comprehension.—­FRIEDRICH RUeCKERT (1788-1866), endowed with a fatal facility of lyric expression, a virtuoso for whom no tour-de-force was too difficult, lived most of his life aloof from the political and social movements of his time.  In his youth his Sonnets in Armor had done sturdy service in the national awakening against Napoleon, but his maturer years were devoted to domestic and academic interests.  Every impression of his life, whether deep or fleeting, was material for a poem or a cycle.  He handled with consummate skill the odd or complicated metres of eastern and southern lyric forms, and he was most versatile as a translator of foreign poetry, ancient and modern, occidental and oriental.  His unusual formal talent and mastery of language were a constant temptation to rapid and superficial versifying; but there are in the vast mass of his production many genuine poems of great beauty.

Two other poets of quite distinctive quality stood aloof from the political interests of the time.  The talented Westphalian Catholic poetess ANNETTE VON DROSTE-HUeLSHOFF (1797-1848) has a place apart in her generation, not only for the fine religious poems of her Christian Year (similar in plan to Keble’s cycle), but also for her nature-lyrics and songs of common life, which are marked by minute realistic detail and refreshing originality of observation and sentiment.  This pious gentlewoman, usually so maidenly in her reserve, nevertheless expressed something of the spirit of emancipation in her quiet protest against the narrow conventional limits of the feminine life.  But she would have recoiled with horror from the reckless propaganda for sex-freedom that was a part of the Young German campaign, as she also repudiated the violence of the revolutionists of 1848.—­If there is something masculine in Fraeulein von Droste’s firm and plastic touch, there is something almost feminine in the finely-chiseled lyrics of the Protestant pastor EDUARD MOeRIKE (1804-1875), whose Poems appeared in the same year (1838), and blended the folk-song simplicity and melody of an Eichendorff with the classical form-sense of a Keats.  This Suabian country vicar, the youngest member of the group about Uhland, lived in the utmost serenity amid the troubles of revolutionary agitation, devoted to his art, turning the common experiences of every day into forms of beauty, or reviving with charming naivete the romantic figures of medieval poetry.