His feeling for nature, especially for her minutest and seemingly most insignificant phenomena, is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter.  Hebbel’s epigram, “Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and buttercups?  ’Tis because ye know not man; ’tis because ye see not the stars,” utterly fails to do justice to Stifter’s poetic individuality.  But in avoiding the great tempests and serious conflicts of the human heart he obeyed a healthy instinct of his artistic genius, choosing to retain undisputed mastery in his own field.

It is, of course, an impossibility to treat adequately, in the remainder of the space at our disposal, the poetic and general literary merit of Fritz Reuter (1810-1874), the great regenerator and rejuvenator of Low German as a literary language.  His lasting merit in the field of the village story is that by his exclusive use of dialect he threw an effective safeguard around the naturalness of the emotional life of his characters, and through this ingenious device will for all time to come serve as a model to writers in this particular domain.  For dialectic utterance does not admit of any super-exaltation of sentiment; at any rate, it helps to detect such at first glance.  But there are other features no less meritorious in his stories of rural life, chief of which is that unique blending of seriousness and humor that makes us laugh and cry at the same time.  With his wise and kind heart, with his deep sympathy for all human suffering, with the smile of understanding for everything truly human, also for all the limitations and follies of human nature, Reuter has worthily taken his place by the side of his model, Charles Dickens.  It is questionable whether even Dickens ever created a character equal to the fine and excellent Uncle Braesig, who, in the opinion of competent critics, is the most successful humorous figure in all German literature.  Braesig is certainly a masterpiece of psychology; as remote from any mere comic effect, despite his idiosyncrasies, as from maudlin sentimentality; an impersonation of sturdy manhood and a victor in life’s battles, no less than his creator, who, although he had lost seven of the most precious years of his life in unjust imprisonment and even had been under sentence of death for a crime of which he knew himself to be absolutely innocent, had not allowed his fate to make him a pessimist.  Nor does the central theme and idea of his masterpiece Ut mine Stromtid ("From my Roaming Days,” 1862), in its strength and beauty, deserve less praise than the character delineation.  Four years previous, in Kein Huesung ("Homeless