The Columbus of this new world shared the fate of the great Genoese in more than one respect.  Like him, he set out in quest of shores that he was destined never to reach.  Like him, he discovered, or rather rediscovered, a new land.  Like him, he so far outstripped his forerunners that they sank into oblivion.  Like Columbus, who died without knowing that he had not reached India, the land of his dreams, but found a new world, he may have departed from this life in the belief that he had been a measurably successful social reformer when he had proved to be a great epic poet.  Like Columbus, he was succeeded by his Amerigo Vespucci, after whom his discovery was named.  The Columbus of the village story is the Swiss clergyman Albert Bitzius, better known by his assumed name as Jeremias Gotthelf; the Amerigo Vespucci is his contemporary Berthold Auerbach.

The choice of his nom de guerre is significant of Jeremias Gotthelf’s literary activity.  He regarded himself as the prophet wailing the misery of his people, who could be delivered only through the aid of the Almighty.  It never occurred to him to strive for literary fame.  He considered himself as a teacher and preacher purely and simply; in a measure, as the successor of Pestalozzi, who, in his Lienhard und Gertrud (1781-1789), had created a sort of pedagogical classic for the humbler ranks of society; and if there be such a thing in Gotthelf’s make-up as literary influence, it must have emanated from the sage of Burgdorf and Yverdun.  To some extent also Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826), justly famed for his Alemannian dialect poems, may have served him as a model, for Hebel followed an avowedly educational purpose in the popular tales of his Schatzkaestlein des rheinischen Hausfreunds ("Treasure Box of the Rhenish Crony"), of which it has been said that they outweigh tons of novels.

Gotthelf’s intention was twofold:  to champion the cause of the rustic yeomanry in the threatening of its peculiar existence—­for the radical spirit of the times was already seizing and preying upon the hallowed customs of the peasantry’s life—­and to fight against certain inveterate vices of the rural population itself that seemed to be indigenous to the soil.  As the first great social writer of the German tongue, he is not content to make the rich answerable for existing conditions, but labors with all earnestness to educate the lower classes toward self-help.  At first he appeared as an uncommonly energetic, conservative, polemic author in whose views the religious, basis of life and genuine moral worth coincided with the traditional character of the country yeomanry.  A more thorough examination revealed to his readers an original epic talent of stupendous powers.  He was indeed eminently fitted to be an educator and reformer among his flock by his own nobility of character, his keen knowledge and sane judgment of the people’s real needs and wants, his warm feeling, and his unexcelled insight into the peasant’s inner life.  Beyond that, however, he was gifted with exuberant poetic imagination and creative power, with an intuitive knowledge of the subtlest workings of the emotional life, and a veritable genius for finding the critical moments in an individual existence.