my walk should be solitary; and because many objects neither beautiful nor sublime met the eye of the beholder, and, in the truly splendid Rosenthal, the gnats, in the best season of the year, allowed no tender thoughts to arise, so did I, by unwearied, persevering endeavor, become extremely attentive to the small life of nature (I would use this word after the analogy of “still life"); and, since the pretty events which one perceives within this circle represent but little in themselves, so I accustomed myself to see in them a significance, which inclined now towards the symbolical, now towards the allegorical, side, accordingly as intuition, feeling, or reflection had the preponderance.  I will relate one incident in place of many.

I was, after the fashion of humanity, in love with my name, and, as young, uneducated people commonly do, wrote it down everywhere.  Once I had carved it very handsomely and accurately on the smooth bark of a linden-tree of moderate age.  The following autumn, when my affection for Annette was in its fullest bloom, I took the trouble to cut hers above it.  Towards the end of the winter, in the mean time, like a capricious lover, I had wantonly sought many opportunities to tease her and cause her vexation:  in the spring I chanced to visit the spot; and the sap, which was rising strongly in the trees, had welled out through the incisions which formed her name, and which were not yet crusted over, and moistened with innocent vegetable tears the already hardened traces of my own.  Thus to see her here weeping over me,—­me, who had so often called up her tears by my ill conduct, filled me with confusion.  At the remembrance of my injustice and of her love, even the tears came into my eyes; I hastened to implore pardon of her, doubly and trebly:  and I turned this incident into an idyl, [Footnote:  Die Laune des Verliebten, translated as The Lover’s Caprice, see p. 241.] which I never could read to myself without affection, or to others without emotion.

While I now, like a shepherd on the Pleisse, was absorbed childishly enough in such tender subjects, and always chose only such as I could easily recall into my bosom, provision from a greater and more important side had long been made for German poets.

The first true and really vital material of the higher order came into German poetry through Frederick the Great and the deeds of the Seven Years’ War.  All national poetry must be shallow or become shallow which does not rest on that which is most universally human,—­upon the events of nations and their shepherds, when both stand for one man.  Kings are to be represented in war and danger, where, by that very means, they appear as the first, because they determine and share the fate of the very least, and thus become much more interesting than the gods themselves, who, when they have once determined the fates, withdraw from all participation in them.  In this view of the subject, every nation, if it would be worth any thing at all, must possess an epopee, to which the precise form of the epic poem is not necessary.