A wavering moonshine lies all over the world of the Fouque romances, like the magic light which illumines the Druda’s castle in “Der Zauberring,” on whose battlements grow tall white flowers, and whose courts are filled with unearthly music from the perpetual revolution of golden wheels.  “On the romantic side,” wrote Richter, in his review of “L’Allemagne” in the Heidelberg Jahrbuecher for 1815, “we could not wish the Briton to cast his first glance at us; for the Briton—­to whom nothing is so poetical as the common weal—­requires (being used to the weight of gold), even for a golden age of poetry, the thick golden wing-cases of his epithet-poets; not the transparent gossamer wings of the Romanticists; no many-coloured butterfly dust; but, at lowest, flower-dust that will grow to something.”

Another Spaetromantiker who has penetrated to the English literary consciousness is the Swabian Ludwig Uhland, the sweetest lyric poet of the romantic school.  Uhland studied the poems of Ossian, the Norse sagas, the “Nibelungenlied” and German hero legends, the Spanish romances, the poetry of the trouveres and the troubadours, and treated motives from all these varied sources.  His true field, however, was the ballad, as Tieck’s was the popular tale; and many of Uhland’s ballads are favourites with English readers, through excellent translations.  Sarah Austin’s version of one of them is widely familiar: 

  “Many a year is in its grave
  Since I crossed this restless wave,” etc.

Longfellow translated three:  “The Black Knight,” “The Luck of Edenhall,” and “The Castle by the Sea.”  It is to be feared that the last-named belongs to what Scherer calls that “trivial kind of romanticism, full of sadness and renunciation, in which kings and queens with crimson mantles and golden crowns, kings’ daughters and beautiful shepherds, harpers, monks, and nuns play a great part.”  But it has a haunting beauty, and a dreamy melody like Goethe’s “Es war ein Koenig in Thule.”  The mocking Heine, who stigmatises Fouque’s knights as combinations of iron and sentimentality, complains that in Uhland’s writings too “the naive, rude, powerful tones of the Middle Ages are not reproduced with idealised fidelity, but rather they are dissolved into a sickly, sentimental melancholy. . . .  The women in Uhland’s poems are only beautiful shadows, embodied moonshine; milk flows in their veins, and sweet tears in their eyes, i.e., tears which lack salt.  If we compare Uhland’s knights with the knights in the old ballads, it seems to us as if the former were composed of suits of leaden armour, entirely filled with flowers, instead of flesh and bones.  Hence Uhland’s knights are more pleasing to delicate nostrils than the old stalwarts, who wore heavy iron trousers and were huge eaters and still huger drinkers.”