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He describes the spirit of the good old man, returning to earth on a bright summer morning, and standing amid the golden corn and the red and blue flowers, and mildly greeting the reapers as of old. The idea is beautiful, is it not?" "Yes, very beautiful!" "But there is nothing morbid in Uhland's mind. He is always fresh and invigorating, like a breezy morning.
"Ah, what a pity! It would have been so nice for you to be side by side again, as in 1866." "How much she knows about us," thought Wilhelm, wondering. "I often think of Uhland's comrades. It must be a great comfort in war to have a friend by one." "Happily one makes friends quickly there."
Taillefer, which has been called "the sparkling queen" of Uhland's ballads, has fresh vigor but lacks the power of handling the moral forces of the universe with as much dramatic vividness. It has a naïve joy of life not elsewhere found in Uhland's ballads. Uhland was the greatest poet of the "Suabian School," a group of young men who objected to being denominated a school.
How much the mere society of such a girl as Gemma meant to him! He would shortly part from her and, most likely, for ever; but so long as they were borne, as in Uhland's song, in one skiff over the sea of life, untossed by tempest, well might the traveller rejoice and be glad. And everything seemed sweet and delightful to the happy voyager.
But Uhland's conservatism is unalterably honest without any reactionary traits; he resigned his professorship rather than be hindered in his political activities, and refused, with the peasant's dourness, all the orders and distinctions that were offered him. Indeed, there is something of the peasant nature in all of Uhland's verse.
The difference between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in the so-called "castle-Romanticism" of Uhland, not in a lingering sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland's ability at will to catch the folk-tone.
It was like the story told in Uhland's touching poem, which probably no one reads now, even in Uhland's own Germany, about the youth who is leaving his native town for ever, accompanied by the geleit the escort, the 'send-off' of his companion-students, and who looks back to the window which the maiden has just opened and thinks, 'If she had but loved me! and a tear comes into the girl's deep blue eye, and she closes her window, hopeless, and thinks, 'If he had but loved me!
Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took the way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other.
He felt the doubtful position of the South German states in the struggle against Napoleon, and it was only when Würtemberg took its stand with the allies in the final conflict that the embarrassment of his position was relieved, and Uhland's patriotic verse assumed its full tone. But his poetry never became a spur to national achievement like the verse of Arndt, that other German poet-professor.
In Uhland's "Three Burschen," if we recollect right, there are but two epithets, and those of the simplest descriptive kind: "Thy fair daughter" and a "black pall." Were there more, we question whether the poet would have succeeded, as he has done, in making our flesh creep as he leads us on from line to line and verse to verse.
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