A pupil of Bodmer,[17] the Swiss Christian Heinrich Myller, had issued a complete edition of the “Nibelungenlied” in 1784-85.  The romantic school now took up this old national epic and praised it as a German Iliad, unequalled in sublimity and natural power.  Uhland gave a great deal of study to it, and A. W. Schlegel lectured upon it at Berlin in 1801-2.  Both Schlegel and Tieck made plans to edit it; and Friedrich von der Hagen, inspired by the former’s lectures, published four editions of it, and a version in modern German.  “For a long time,” testifies Heine, “the ‘Nibelungenlied’ was the sole topic of discussion among us. . . .  It is difficult for a Frenchman to form a conception of this work, or even of the language in which it is written.  It is a language of stone, and the verses are, as it were, blocks of granite.”  By way of giving his French readers a notion of the gigantic passions and rude, primitive strength of the poem, he imagines a battle of all the Gothic cathedrals of Europe on some vast plain, and adds, “But no! even then you can form no conception of the chief characters of the ‘Nibelungenlied’; no steeple is so high, no stone so hard as the fierce Hagen, or the revengeful Chrimhilde.”

Another work which corresponds roughly with Percy’s “Reliques,” as the “Nibelungenlied” with Macpherson’s “Ossian,” was “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” (The Boy’s Magic Trumpet), published in 1806-8 by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, with a dedication to Goethe.  This was a three-volume collection of German songs, and although it came much later than Percy’s, and after the imitation of old national balladry in Germany was already well under way, so that its relation to German romanticism is not of an initial kind, like that of Percy’s collection in England; still its importance was very great.  It influenced all the lyrical poetry of the Romantic school, and especially the ballads of Uhland.  “I cannot sufficiently extol this book,” says Heine.  “It contains the sweetest flowers of German poesy. . . .  On the title page . . . is the picture of a lad blowing a horn; and when a German in a foreign land views this picture, he almost seems to hear the old familiar strains, and homesickness steals over him. . . .  In these ballads one feels the beating of the German popular heart.  Here is revealed all its sombre merriment, all its droll wit.  Here German wrath beats furiously the drum; here German satire stings, here German love kisses.  Here we behold the sparkling of genuine German wine, and genuine German tears.”

The German romantic school, like the English, but more learnedly and systematically, sought to reinforce its native stock of materials by motifs drawn from foreign literatures, and particularly from Norse mythology and from Spanish romance.  Percy’s translation of Malet:  Gray’s versions from the Welsh and the Scandinavian:  Southey’s “Chronicles of the Cid” and Lockhart’s translations of the Spanish ballads are paralleled