HISTORIC SURVEY OF GERMAN POETRY.* THE German language and literature are every day attracting a greater portion of attention in this country; and, perhaps, the time is not far distant when Goethe, Schiller, and Klopstock will be as familiar to us as Tasso, Ariosto, and Dante. But we have hitherto had no English work to which we could refer for information respecting German authors, except the very scanty notices in biographical dictionaries. This was a want that required to be remedied; and those who have read Sismondi's very interesting volumes on the literature of the south of Europe, will bear testimony to the interest that may be produced by a judicious use of such materials. We will not take upon us to say, that the present work quite comes up to Sismondi's in point of merit, but it is the only production we have on the subject. It contains a great deal of necessary information and ingenious criticism; and it presents us (which Sismondi does not) several beautiful pieces of poetry, exceedingly well translated. We feel, therefore, obliged to Mr. Taylor for his contribution to our foreign department of literature; but we cannot avoid expressing our annoyance that he should travel out of the record, as he sometimes does, introducing matter that has not the slightest relation to his subject. Thus, in section 12, he babbles away at great length, in what he himself acknowledges to be a digression, on the ill effects of the Reformation, and its barbarising influence on the human mind; and, good easy man! snugly seated in his study at Norwich, enjoying all the advantages of that fatal revolution, dreams over the elegant and classical system of religion of which we might now be in possession, had 'the literary taste of the Medici, or the hoslity of the Venetians to the Roman see, or the commercial liberality of the Genoese, or the philosophic courage of the professors of Padua,' been let to run its free course, without the barbarians of the north thrusting themselves, as they rudely did, into the business. Glorious visions, too, arise of the severely-beautiful consistency into which the fellow-thinkers of the eloquent and accomplished Socini, in their successive conventions at Vicenza, would have shapen the articles of a narrower, simpler, purer, and sublimer creed.' Alas! Mr. Taylor, this is all auld wives' talk.' Little would have been the effect of all those gentle appliances to the monstrous system that then was dominant: ense recidendum est was the only prescription to be used-bold practitioners, like Luther and Calvin, the only doctors to be employed. Were it not for such men as I,' said very truly W. Whiston to Halley, the philosopher, you would be still worshipping relics,' or something to that purpose. But we have no desire to enter the controversial field with Mr. Taylor. We merely wish he had preserved his polemics for another place. Our author had, it appears, been in the habit of writing notices of German works for the Monthly Review in its best days, and of condensing lives for the Monthly Magazine. The present work is Historic Survey of German Poetry, interspersed with various Translations, by W. Taylor, of Norwich. Vol. I. London, Treuttel and Würtz. 1828. chiefly composed of such ready-made articles. The first hundred and seventy-eight pages are the least valuable portion of the book. He commences with an account of the stem-tribes of northern Europe, and his account is anything but satisfactory. Next, he undertakes to show, that Ovid is the first German poet on record, and that he was the inventor of German hexameters, which he thus proves :-Ovid was exiled to Tomi, on the Euxine, then inhabited by the Getæ, or Goths, the ancestors of the Germans, and he made verses in the Getic tongue to the Roman measures. These Getæ were the people who afterwards oocupied the Upper Danube and the Elbe, hence the language in which Ovid wrote was High Dutch, and he saw how adapted it was to receive the Greek and Latin rhythms. Ovid, therefore, invented German hexameters! This, however, we fancy, was one of the lost arts, and we suspect it was recovered in the last century. What the resemblance is between a German hexameter regulated by accent, and a Greek one modified by quantity, Mr. Taylor does not condescend to explain. All the kindred tongues are included by Mr. Taylor in his view of German poetry. The songs of the Scandinavian Edda form a part of it; and Finn Magnusen and his friends will read with some surprise our author's account of Odin and his religion. Odin was, according to him, Prince of the Quadi, who was taken prisoner, and detained as a hostage by the Emperor Julian, then governor of Gaul, where he learned the Roman arts of war, and acquired a zeal for paganism. On his return, he made a religion for his people, who, we are perhaps to suppose, had been hitherto destitute of such an article. As he was a soldier, he of course made a good soldierly system for them; and to stimulate their courage, Valhella, the heaven to which they were to hope to arrive, was modelled after a Roman recruiting-house, with shields hung from the roof, coats of mail suspended against the walls, and sheaves of lances arranged in regular colonnade; and where drilling, and eating pork, and swilling ale, occupied the day. The baggage-women and camp-trulls were exalted to the dignity of Volkyries, or choruses of the slain. Valhella had, in fact, all the essentials of a camp in it; and certain crimps, called Scalds, went about from one waggon-station to another, singing these ballads made by Odin-in which some look for dogmas as profound as in the systems of ancient Egypt or India,-to stimulate the stout brave German youth to enlist. This is, at least, amusing. We think more highly of the Edda; and, to say the truth, we apprehend that our author knows nothing at all about the matter. We doubt, indeed, if he has any knowledge of northern literature; for what he gives as the history of the sword Tyrfing, abridged from the Hervarar Saga, by Gräter, proves he never read the original Sagaan act that, we believe, demands a knowledge of Icelandic or Swedish for the abridgment given is much such a thing as what we call a free translation, where the poet adds, as he pleases, till he makes the work hardly recognizable. Mr. Taylor gives a Romance of more than forty pages, an expansion of perhaps a dozen of the old Saga, yet it does not contain half the story of Tyrfing. The destinies of 6 that fatal sword are related in a real abridgment of a few pages in the Fairy Mythology.' A tolerable analysis of the old Anglo-Saxon poem of Berwulf succeeds; but Mr. Taylor makes of the grim guest Grændel,' a man, and not an infernal spirit, as is done by the continental critics. 6 Now clear of the north, our author turns him to Germany, where he is certainly more at home. He first takes a view of what he denominates the Frankish period, and gives some specimens of the verses of Otfried, and other poets of that day. He thinks that this was the time when Renard the Fox' made its first appearance. The following encomium on the victory of Louis III. over the Normans has some merit : "Then took he shield and spear, And quickly forward rode, The song was sung, The fight begun, The blood shone in the cheeks Of the merry Franks, But no blade of them all Fought so bravely as Ludovic." The next period, the Swabian, was more brilliant. The gallant house of Hohenstauffen distinguished itself by its patronage of literature; and, during the 130 years that it occupied the imperial throne, poetry flourished beneath a royal sunshine. The works of nearly 200 poets of that age have come down to us. The chief were Hartman von Aue, who translated a part of Lancelot du Lac, and the whole of Iwain, into German verse; Wolfrom, of Eschelbach, who translated the celebrated romance of the Sangreal into two parts, named Titurel and Parcival, and wrote several of the poems of the Heldenbuch; and Conrad, the supposed author of the Lay of the Nibelungs. Numerous pious prelates, monks, and knights, adorned this period by their poetic talents. The watch-songs, which one knight would sing while another ventured into the chamber of his mistress, were, in some measure, peculiar to this period. The following one will be read with pleasure: "Already gleams the eastern sky In full array, A period intervened between the accession of the House of Austria and the Reformation, in which allegorical poetry chiefly prevailed. This was the period of the founding of universities and colleges. Brandt's Ship of Fools,' and the comic romance of Eulenspiegel,' with numerous mysteries and moralities, called Fast-night Plays, formed the popular literature. One of the most remarkable of the Fast-night Plays was the Canonization of Pope Joan;' a curious subject, doubtless, and strongly resembling in wildness and boldness of incident and construction, and in the inculcation of a spirit of bastard piety, those monstrous productions of the Spanish stage, La Devocion de la Cruz, and similar pieces, which some are absurd enough even now to admire. The story, as given by our author from Bouterwek, his chief guide, is shortly this:-The devils, out of enmity to religion, resolve to tempt Jutta, the heroine, to profane the papacy. She yields to their suggestions, assumes man's attire, and graduates in the University of Paris. She goes to Rome, and becomes a cardinal and pope. This strange event amazes heaven; the Virgin interposes, and sends an angel to the pope to ask which she will have-perdition, or penance and pardon? holiness chuses the latter. Death is sent for her soul, but complaisantly waits till her accouchement is over, and then takes her to the infernal regions, where the devils torment her with peals of laughter and mockery. Again the Virgin, moved by the prayer of Jutta, interposes; an angel is sent to deliver her, and she ascends in glory into heaven. As specimens, the following lines will give some idea of the style of this piece. A devil is scourging Jutta, and thus taunts her :: "There must be penalties for sin— Call somewhat louder on your saint- There's some hell-drink-some spirits-swallow ! I'll fetch some ointment while you're kneeling, That makes wounds smart the time they're healing." Lucifer thus convenes the devils.-It reminds us of Prospero's more poetic invocation, and of Medea's. "Whereso'er ye rove or dwell, Come home, ye loyal host of hell! From earth and sea, from fire and air, Hither, ye devils, all repair! From hill and dale, from stream and lake, From wood and wild, from bush and brake, Attend the summons of your lord, And hearken to his awful word!" This strange drama is said to have had a powerful effect in Germany, and to have so strongly impressed the belief of there actually having been a Pope Joan, that when the Protestants afterwards laid hold of the story, and began to turn it to account, it required no small learning and industry to prove its falsehood. We now come to the period of the Reformation, and to the precious "episode" already noticed, and which we now pass over, merely expressing our dislike of the terms in which Mr. Taylor, who fancies himself a philosopher, but is not, speaks of that event and its authors. On Luther he has little praise to bestow; and even the worthy shoemaker, Hans Sacks, on account (we suppose) of his share in that calamitous event, is allotted not more than a quarter of a page. He compares him to "our Pierce, the Ploughman," who, he says, |