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Of this band was Harvey Worthington Loomis, who won a three years' scholarship in Doctor Dvôrák's composition class at the National Conservatory, by submitting an excellent, but rather uncharacteristic, setting of Eichendorff's "Frühlingsnacht."
Eichendorff's patriotism was of the traditional type, echoing faintly the battle-hymns of the War of Liberation. For the great liberal movement of the thirties and forties he had neither sympathy nor comprehension. In his youth his Sonnets in Armor had done sturdy service in the national awakening against Napoleon, but his maturer years were devoted to domestic and academic interests.
The first real poet to borrow from Brentano was Eichendorff, in whose Ahnung und Gegenwart we have the poem since published separately under the title of "Waldgespräch," and familiar to many through Schumann's composition. That Eichendorff's Lorelei operates the forest is only to be expected of the author of so many Waldlieder.
But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony.
It was a Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's beautiful poems on the death of his child.
They sang one of his saddest melodies, Resignation, a setting of a poem of Eichendorff's, and a chorale by his old friend Bruckner, who had died several years before him. His faithful friends, Faisst at the head of them, took care to have a monument erected to his memory near those of Beethoven and Schubert.
Indeed, the Schlegels may be said to have been without a sense for nature; in Tieck there is a great discrepancy between the man, his beliefs, and his practise, and Novalis' nature-feeling is not attached to any specific place. But Brentano loves the Rhine, and Eichendorff's landscape is genuinely Silesian.
There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description, none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over Eichendorff's landscapes the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time, this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind.
Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a permanent part of the musical life of the nation. The Broken Ring has passed into a folk-song, and "O valleys wide!" with Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import.
Sometimes the voice and the pianoforte express the contrast that so often exists between the words and the thought of the poem; at other times they express two personalities, as in his setting of Goethe's Prometheus, where the accompaniment represents Zeus sending out his thunderbolts, and the voice interprets Titan; or again, he may depict, as in the setting of Eichendorff's Serenade, a student in love in the accompaniment, while the song is the voice of an old man who is listening to it and thinking of his youth.
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