Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was not fundamentally a Romantic personality.  He is called “the classicist of Romanticism,” and with justice.  The term shows that he is felt to have something of completion, of inner perfection, of harmony of form and content which was lacking in the truer Romanticists.  Uhland was without their early cosmopolitanism.  Political life as manifested in him was, first of all, Suabian—­for Uhland was a Suabian and most intimately associated with that section of Germany.  He was actively and practically interested in the politics of his native land as a member of its legislative bodies and as delegate to the national parliament at Frankfurt in 1848.  Uhland had a conservative love for the “good old Suabian law.”  He felt the doubtful position of the South German states in the struggle against Napoleon, and it was only when Wuertemberg took its stand with the allies in the final conflict that the embarrassment of his position was relieved, and Uhland’s patriotic verse assumed its full tone.  But his poetry never became a spur to national achievement like the verse of Arndt, that other German poet-professor.  As a member of the national parliament, Uhland was opposed to the exclusion of Austria from the hegemony, and to the two-chamber system of legislation.  But Uhland’s conservatism is unalterably honest without any reactionary traits; he resigned his professorship rather than be hindered in his political activities, and refused, with the peasant’s dourness, all the orders and distinctions that were offered him.

Indeed, there is something of the peasant nature in all of Uhland’s verse.  Sturdy reserve characterizes it—­that reserve which forbids the peasant to show his feelings under the stress of the greatest emotion.  Uhland does not carry his feelings to market; like Schiller, he is not a love poet.  There is no display, no self-analysis, no self-exaltation, no amalgamation of self with nature.  Uhland as a poet is not interested in his own psychology, but in the impinging world and in the tender past.  When Goethe said that Uhland was primarily a balladist, he was right, for the ballad presupposes just that permeation of the object by the emotion that satisfies the unquestionable lyric gift possessed by Uhland, without in any way destroying the essentially narrative objectivity of his style.

Uhland’s greatest fame rests, then, on his ballads.  The difference between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in the so-called “castle-Romanticism” of Uhland, not in a lingering sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland’s ability at will to catch the folk-tone.  Sometimes this folk-tone is a question of certain technical tricks, such as the abrupt shift of scene, repetition, varying series of scenes or words, archaized language; but it is just as often in the mood which Uhland throws over the whole.  He thus can catch the inner form and essential mood of the popular ballad in a way that