When the boy Chamisso was nine years old, the family was driven from France but was later allowed to return, though Adalbert never went back permanently.  Thus it was that during the years 1806-13, the young expatriate led a life of the greatest mental torment; France no longer meant anything to him, and in Germany he felt himself a stranger and an outcast.  Always awkward personally, and of a nervous temperament, he found it difficult to adjust himself to surrounding conditions.  His scholarly zeal, however, and his ability to sit for hours in close study, show how completely his mentality was adjustable to the German manner.  In Berlin he was accepted by the younger Romantic group and was a member of the famous North Star Club with Arnim and his set.  In 1815-18 he made a trip around the world, and in later years devoted himself especially to the study of botany.

Only the poetry of Chamisso’s later period is of supreme consequence.  As a man in the fifties, he wrote some of his most beautiful verse.  He was a naive poet, but a poet of many moods.  His love poetry is the poetry of longing, and ranks with that of Brentano in its ability to suggest states of feeling.  Among his best poems are his verse-tales, such as The Women of Weinsberg, where his narrative genius ranks with that of his fellow-countryman, La Fontaine.  Especially good are his poems in terzines.  These mark the real introduction of this metre into Germany.  The best of these, Salas y Gomez, has the additional advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the basis of it is derived from his tour of circumnavigation.  His poems in this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French fabliaux.  His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as The Old Washerwoman, to quote Goethe’s Tasso, “he often ennobles what seems vulgar to us.”

Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early reminiscences of Uhland’s “castle-Romanticism,” and in his poetry of indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took—­the way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through Tieck’s novelettes to realistic prose on the other.

As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a work which has become international in popularity, Peter Schlemihl (1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose.  The tale of the man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of Fortunatus has become in Chamisso’s hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale in key-note and style.  At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic in subject-matter and treatment.  The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word variously interpreted as “Lover of God,” or as “awkward fellow.”  If it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that