There are three poets whose main value lies in the appeal they made to the belligerent spirit of the day.  They represent three phases of the German character.  Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860), the eldest of the group, is the pamphleteer, the politician, and the teacher, as well as the poet.  He is the hard-headed, earnest intellectual whose lyric poetry, whatever its esthetic weaknesses, arouses to action by its deadly insistence on an idea, on hatred of the French, on salvation by the sword.  Arndt is all virility and fire.

The life of Theodor Koerner (1791-1813), the son of Schiller’s intimate friend, shows that mixture of idealism and practicality for which the Germans are becoming more and more noted.  Koerner was aroused from his poetic diletantism by the alarms of war.  He enlisted in the famous Luetzow corps and died a soldier’s death, thus becoming the symbol of all that was ideal for the patriotic youth of his day, the hero and the poet, the man of “Lyre and Sword.”  His patriotic poems, often composed on the very field of battle, were sung by the soldiers to the roll of cannon and the beat of drum.  The trace of Schiller’s rhetoric in Koerner’s poems adds to their effectiveness, spurring to action and firing young minds to patriotic emulation of high ideals.  Like Arndt’s lyrics, Koerner’s poems are actual documents in the struggle for liberty-verses which affected men.

The German mystic trait, the touch of the religious, marks the poetry of Max Schenkendorf (1783-1817).  His was a quieter nature, which loved the Fatherland, its language, its romantic scenes and past.  Characteristic also is his veneration for Queen Luise, whose beauty, tenderness, and fortitude had endeared her to the people as well as to the poets.

Though every Romantic poet took some stand on the questions of the day, the most distinctly lyric of them, Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), was not of a military temperament.  Even he, however, followed the King of Prussia’s call to arms but, significantly enough for “the last Knight of Romanticism,” as he was called, arrived a day too late on the field of Waterloo.  The somewhat fanciful title by no means indicates a jouster at windmills; it implies, rather, that in Eichendorff there were gathered for the last time with all their poetic brilliancy, the declining rays of the Romantic movement.  After him, the enthusiasm is in its decline or changes to forms which lie outside the confines of the Romantic spirit.

Eichendorff is a thorough pleinairiste, filled with the atmosphere of his native Silesia and, in some measure, hardly intelligible apart from its landscape.  His birth-place, the castle of Lubowitz, near Ratibor, rising high on a hill in full sight of the Oder, is the ultimate background of all his nature-poetry.  Here must be localized the ever-recurring hill and valley, wood, nightingale, and castle.  Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and