With EMANUEL GEIBEL (1815-1884) we come to the voice of fair compromise between the extremes.  Geibel was a conservative liberal, honestly patriotic without partisanship.  Thus his Twelve Sonnets for Schleswig-Holstein (1846) were broadly German in inspiration, and his love of liberty was matched by his aristocratic hatred of the mob.  Geibel succeeded in once more gaining the widest popularity, in days filled with partisan clamor, for the pure lyric of romantic inspiration.  He was in a true sense the poet-laureate of his generation.  Lacking in real originality, he was yet sincere in the expression of his emotion, and his faultless form clothed the utterance of a soul of rare purity and nobility.

As in the days after the War of Liberation, so in the years following the revolutionary movements of 1848, the generous hopes of the people seemed doomed to perish in weariness and disappointment, and the voice of democratic poetry was silenced.  In the reaction that followed the intoxication of liberal enthusiasm, with the failure of the attempt to unify Germany under Prussian leadership, the German lands relapsed into dull acquiescence in the old regime.  But the seed of the new day had been sown, and the harvest came in due time.  Strachwitz’s intuition was justified; the strong man did appear, in the person of Bismarck, and the “Gordian knot” was cut with the sword of the war of 1870.  But the liberal dream of 1848 was realized, also, in the creation of a unified and powerful German Empire on a constitutional basis.

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[Illustration:  ANASTASIUS GRUeN]

ANASTASIUS GRUeN

  A SALON SCENE[14] (1831)

  Evening:  In the festive halls the light of many candles gleams,
  Shedding from the mirrors’ crystal thousand-fold reflected beams. 
  In the sea of light are gliding, with a stately, solemn air,
  Honored, venerable matrons, ladies young and very fair.

  And among them wander slowly, clad in festive garments grand,
  Here the valiant sons of battle, there the rulers of the land. 
  But on one that I see moving every eye is fixed with fear—­
  Few indeed among the chosen have the courage to draw near.

  He it is by whose firm guidance Austrians’ fortunes rise or sink,
  He who in the Princes’ Congress for them all must act and think. 
  But behold him now!  How gracious, courteous, gentle he’s to all,
  And how modest, unassuming, and how kind to great and small!

  In the light his orders sparkle with a faint and careless grace,
  But a friendly, gentle smile is always playing on his face
  When he plucks the ruddy rose leaves that some rounded bosom wears,
  Or when, like to withered blossoms, kingdoms he asunder tears.

  Equally enchanting is it, when he praises golden curls,
  Or when, from anointed heads, the royal crowns away he hurls. 
  Yes, methinks ’tis heavenly rapture, which delights the happy man
  Whom his words to Elba’s fastness or to Munkacs’ prison ban.