A folk-song is a song which has become a part of the lyric consciousness of the people; often the singers do not know that what they are singing has a literary origin—­they have thoroughly assimilated it.  In the best sense of the term, the songs of The Boy’s Magic Horn are folk-songs.  They are both narrative and dramatic as well as pure lyric in form, and are simple, powerful, and direct in expression.  They treat all phases of German life of the past, from a crude version of the Lay of Hildebrant to the riddles, lullabies, and counting-out rhymes of children.  Pictures of the moral and social life of peasant Germany are followed by poems of nature and of the supernatural.  Tragedies vary with humorous skits, extravagant and mocking, and the collection is enlivened with many flyting poems about tailors—­a favorite butt of the peasant past.  Ballads of popular origin and ballads with an added sentimental touch, such as the famous Strassburg poem with the added Alpine horn motif, are found here.  Delicate, haunting rhymes alternate with crude assonances, and occasionally one meets with banalities; but, as a whole, the collection is of surprising merit.  It is a product of the Romantic return to the past, but is filled with a poetic outlook toward the future.  Of the work as a whole Heine says, “I cannot praise the book enough.  It contains the most graceful flowers of the German spirit, and he who wishes to know the German people at their best, let him read these folk-songs. * * * In these songs one feels the heart-beat of the German folk.  It is a revelation of all melancholy cheerfulness, all their foolish reason.  Here German anger beats its drum, here is the pipe of German scorn, the kiss of German love.”

The part which the Romantic mood played in the Wars of Liberation is definite and well-recognized.  The soldier, Gneisenau, felt that the politics of the future lay in the poetry of the day, and Adam Muller proudly proclaimed poetry to be a war-power:  The Romantic longing for the distance, for love, when directed to the remote past of the Fatherland, not only yielded a new life in art and religion but induced a tremendous patriotism as well.  The cosmopolitan temper which caused Lessing to say that love of country was an unknown feeling to him, gave way before an intenser nationalism.  The earlier Romanticists began it; in the later group it took more specific form and became a propaganda.  It was also precipitated in verse and prose.  The spark came from Fichte, who was gradually led to see in the destiny of the German people a large cultural fact.  Fichte, like a true German, emphasized education as the means of progress:  Arnim grasped the problem from another side; he felt himself autochthonous, and consciously set out to make his connection with the soil react on those sprung from the soil.  In him, as well as in Fichte, dawns the ideal of the German people as an entity, as a nation.