“A wandering shepherd young and fair
  Beneath the royal castle strayed.”

“But so much has happened since then!  What then seemed to me so grand; all that chivalry and Catholicism; those cavaliers that hack and hew at each other in knightly tournaments; those gentle squires and virtuous dames of high degree; the Norseland heroes and minnesingers; the monks and nuns; ancestral tombs thrilling with prophetic powers; colourless passion, dignified by the high-sounding title of renunciation, and set to the accompaniment of tolling bells; a ceaseless whining of the ‘Miserere’; how distasteful all that has become to me since then!” And—­of Fouque’s romances—­“But our age turns away from all fairy pictures, no matter how beautiful. . . .  This reactionary tendency, this continual praise of the nobility, this incessant glorification of the feudal system, this everlasting knight-errantry balderdash . . . this everlasting sing-song of armours, battle-steeds, high-born virgins, honest guild-masters, dwarfs, squires, castles, chapels, minnesingers, faith, and whatever else that rubbish of the Middle Ages may be called, wearied us.”

It is a part of the irony of things that this satirist of romance should have been precisely the one to compose the most popular of all romantic ballads; and that the most current of all his songs should have been the one in which he sings of the enchantress of the Rhine,

  “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten
  Dass ich so traurig bin.”

The “Loreley” is translated into many tongues, and is sung everywhere.  In Germany it is a really national song.  And yet the tale on which it is founded is not an ancient folk legend—­“ein Maehrchen aus alten Zeiten”—­but a modern invention of Clemens Brentano, who first published it in 1802 in the form of a ballad inserted in one of his novels: 

  “Zu Bacharach am Rheine
    Wohnt’ eine Zauberin: 
  Sie war so schoen und feine
    Und riss viel Herzen hin.”

A certain forgotten romanticist, Graf Loeben, made a lyrical tale out of it in 1821, and Heine composed his ballad in 1824, afterwards set to the mournful air in which it is now universally familiar.

It has been mentioned that Heine’s “Romantische Schule” was a sort of continuation and correction of Mme. de Stael’s “L’Allemagne.”  That very celebrated book was the result of the distinguished lady’s residence in Germany, and of her determination to reveal Germany to France.  It has been compared in its purpose to the “Germania” of Tacitus, in which the historian held up the primitive virtues of the Teutonic race as a lesson and a warning to corrupt Rome.  Mme. de Stael had arranged to publish her book in 1810, and the first impression of ten thousand copies had already been printed, when the whole edition was seized and destroyed by the police, and the author was ordered to quit France within twenty-four hours.  All this, of course, was