Il mourut le vendredi,
      Le dernier jour de son age;
    S’il fut mort le samedi,
      Il eut vecu davantage.

The inchoate national aspirations, as also the grave and resolute patriotism of the Germans, found interpreters of genius in the persons of Arndt and Koerner, the latter of whom laid down his life for the people whom he loved so well.  During the Napoleonic period all their compositions, many of which will live so long as the German language lasts, strike the same note—­the determination of Germans to be free: 

    Lasst klingen, was nur klingen kann,
      Die Trommeln und die Floeten! 
    Wir wollen heute Mann fuer Mann
      Mit Blut das Eisen roeten. 
    Mit Henkerblut, Franzoesenblut—­
      O suesser Tag der Rache! 
    Das klinget allen Deutschen gut,
      Das ist die grosse Sache.

Some six decades later, when Arndt’s famous question “Was ist das deutsche Vaterland?” was about to receive a practical answer, the German soldier marched to the frontier to the inspiriting strains of “Die Wacht am Rhein.”

No more characteristic national poetry was ever written than that evoked by the civil war which raged in America some fifty years ago.  Those who, like the present writer, were witnesses on the spot of some portion of that great struggle, are never likely to forget the different impressions left on their minds by the poetry respectively of the North and of the South.  The pathetic song of the Southerners, “Maryland, my Maryland,” which was composed by Mr. T.R.  Randall, appeared, even whilst the contest was still undecided, to embody the plaintive wail of a doomed cause, and stood in strong contrast to the aggressive and almost rollicking vigour of “John Brown’s Body” and “The Union for ever, Hurrah, boys, Hurrah!”

Even a nation so little distinguished in literature as the Ottoman Turks is able, under the stress of genuine patriotism, to embody its hopes and aspirations in stirring verse.  The following, which was written during the last Russo-Turkish war, suffers in translation.  Its rhythm and heroic, albeit savage, vigour may perhaps even be appreciated by those who are not familiar with the language in which it is written: 

    Achalum sanjaklari! 
    Ghechelim Balkanlari! 
    Allah!  Allah! deyerek,
    Dushman kanin’ ichelim! 
      Padishahmiz chok yasha! 
      Ghazi Osman chok yasha![109]

Let us now turn to Italy and Greece, the nations from which modern Europe inherits most of its ideas, and which have furnished the greater part of the models in which those ideas are expressed, whether in prose or in verse.