If I should be asked to state my conception of art—­it is understood that here, as elsewhere, that only the art of poetry is in question—­I would base it on the unconditional freedom of the artist, and say:  Art should seize upon life in all its various forms, and represent it.  It is obvious that this cannot be accomplished by mere copying.  The artist must afford life something more than a morgue, where it is prepared for burial.  We wish to see the point from which life starts and the one where it loses itself, as a single wave, in the great sea of infinite, effect.  That this effect is a twofold one, and that it can turn inward as well as outward, is of course self-evident.  For the rest—­be it said incidentally—­here is the point from which a parallel can be drawn between the phenomena of real life and those of life embodied in art.

I will now review the separate branches of art at which Koerner and Kleist have tried their hand.  We find that they are lyric poetry, drama, and narrative.  All three have to do with the representation of life, and if a division can be made it can only be based upon the various ways in which life is wont to manifest itself.  Life manifests itself either as a reaction upon outward impressions, or lacking these, directly from within.  When it works directly from within, we usually designate the form under which it appears as feeling.  Feeling is the element of lyric poetry; the art of limiting and representing it makes the lyric poet.  Let no one object that there are feelings enough which arise in consequence of outward impressions, and that these too have been expressed sufficiently often by the poets; I am very much inclined to distinguish between the results of these impressions and the feelings which well up from the depths of the soul in consecrated moments; and in any case, these alone are a worthy subject for the lyric poet; for only in them does the whole man actually live, they only are the product of his whole being.  I hate examples because they are either make-shifts or will-o’-the-wisps, but here I must add that in Uhland’s song, “A short while hence I dreamed,” I find such a feeling expressed.

The drama represents the thought which seeks to become a deed through action or suffering.  The narrative is really not a pure form, but a combination of the lyric and dramatic elements,—­a combination which differs from the drama in that it develops the outer life from the inner, whereas in the drama the inner proceeds from the outer.

Let us now examine what Theodor Koerner and Heinrich von Kleist have accomplished, in the first place, as lyric poets.  Kleist (unhappily) has left us very little in this field, Koerner (again unhappily) all the more.  Koerner’s war-songs have, in this stage of our investigation, the precedence over his other lyric productions, for two reasons:  in the first place, they found the largest public and earned for their author, beside the royalties,