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Robbers and robber-castles have long since passed away, and the people, rough and uncouth as they may at first seem, are as kindly-hearted as they are honest. Among them was born and in their incomprehensible dialect wrote Hebel, the German Burns. We dislike the practice of using the name of one author as the characteristic designation of another.
Whatever local or linguistic interest may be manifested for the works of Groth in the Ditmarsch Platt-Deutsch, or for the sweet Alemannic songs of Hebel, the centralizing tongue is that in which Schiller and Goethe wrote. The allied Danish and Dutch have escaped this ingulfing process.
Hebel, however, possesses the additional merit no slight one, either of giving faithful expression to the thoughts, emotions, and passions of the simple people among whom his childhood was passed.
As soon as the snows melt and the cows can be driven afield, he betakes himself to his buron on the alp, if married, leaving his wife in the valley below. Have the fromager of the Cantal hills and the Caussenard of the Lozerien steppe their legends, folklore, songs? Have their love-stories been chronicled by some French Auerbach, their ballads found a translator in a French Hebel?
Now Adam took Eve and the boy to his home in the east. God sent him various kinds of seeds by the hand of the angel Michael, and he was taught how to cultivate the ground and make it yield produce and fruits, to sustain himself and his family and his posterity. After a while, Eve bore her second son, whom she named Hebel, because, she said, he was born but to die.
The tongue of Burns can be spoken only by a born Scot; and our Yankee, which is rather a grotesque English than a dialect, is unfortunately so associated with the coarse and the farcical Lowell's little poem of "'Zekel's Courtship" being the single exception that it seems hardly adapted to the simple and tender fancies of Hebel.
A pure, honest, and honorable life, won by a battle with evil desires, which, commencing with birth, ceased their assaults only at the brink of the grave! A daily struggle, and a daily victory! Hebel lost his mother in his thirteenth year, but was fortunate in possessing generous patrons, who contributed enough to the slender means he inherited to enable him to enter the Gymnasium at Carlsruhe.
It is, in fact, only within the last twenty years that the Germans have become acquainted with Burns, chiefly through the admirable translations of the poet Freiligrath. To Hebel belongs the merit of having bent one of the harshest of German dialects to the uses of poetry. We doubt whether the lyre of Apollo was ever fashioned from a wood of rougher grain.
On the discovery being made that many of the ancient German ballads were still preserved among the lower classes, chiefly among the mountaineers, they were also sought for, and some poets tuned their lyres on the naive popular tone, etc., first, Hebel, in the partly extremely natural, partly extremely affected, Alemannic songs, which have found frequent imitators.
"A most remarkable development of" , said Gall, abruptly breaking off, nor could he be induced to complete the sentence. Hebel, however, frankly exclaimed, "You certainly mean the thievish propensity. I know I have it by nature, for I continually feel its suggestions." What a picture is presented by this confession!
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