Germany from the Earliest Period, vol 4 | Page 4

during his visit
to Persia; the gentle Simon Dach, whose sorrowing notes bewail the
miseries of the age. He founded a society of melancholy poets at
Königsberg, in Prussia, the members of which composed elegies for
each other; Tscherning and Andrew Gryphius, the Corneille of
Germany, a native of Glogau, whose dramas are worthy of a better age
than the insipid century in which they were produced. The life of this
dramatist was full of incident. His father was poisoned; his mother died
of a broken heart. He wandered over Germany during the thirty years'
war, pursued by fire, sword, and pestilence, to the latter of which the
whole of his relations fell victims. He travelled over the whole of
Europe, spoke eleven languages, and became a professor at Leyden,
where he taught history, geography, mathematics, physics, and
anatomy. These poets were, however, merely exceptions to the general
rule. In the poetical societies, the "Order of the Palm" or "Fructiferous
Society," founded A.D. 1617, at Weimar, by Caspar von Teutleben, the
"Upright Pine Society," established by Rempler of Löwenthal at
Strasburg, that of the "Roses," founded A.D. 1643, by Philip von Zesen,
at Hamburg, the "Order of the Pegnitz-shepherds," founded A.D. 1644,
by Harsdörfer, at Nuremberg, the spirit of the Italian and French operas
and academies prevailed, and pastoral poetry, in which the god of Love

was represented wearing an immense allonge peruke, and the
coquettish immorality of the courts was glowingly described in
Arcadian scenes of delight, was cultivated. The fantastical romances of
Spain were also imitated, and the invention of novel terms was deemed
the highest triumph of the poet. Every third word was either Latin,
French, Spanish, Italian, or English. Francisci of Lübeck, who
described all the discoveries of the New World in a colloquial romance
contained in a thick folio volume, was the most extravagant of these
scribblers. The romances of Antony Ulric, duke of Brunswick, who
embraced Catholicism on the occasion of the marriage of his daughter
with the emperor Charles VI., are equally bad. Lauremberg's satires,
written A.D. 1564, are excellent. He said with great truth that the
French had deprived the German muse of her nose and had patched on
another quite unsuited to her German ears. Moscherosch (Philander von
Sittewald) wrote an admirable and cutting satire upon the manners of
the age, and Greifenson von Hirschfeld is worthy of mention as the
author of the first historical romance that gives an accurate and graphic
account of the state of Germany during the thirty years' war.
This first school was succeeded by a second of surpassing extravagance.
Hoffman von Hoffmannswaldau, A.D. 1679, the founder of the second
Silesian school, was a caricature of Opitz, Lohenstein of Gryphius,
Besser of Flemming, Talander and Ziegler of Zesen, and even Francisci
was outdone by that most intolerable of romancers, Happel. This school
was remarkable for the most extravagant license and bombastical
nonsense, a sad proof of the moral perversion of the age. The German
character, nevertheless, betrayed itself by a sort of naïve pedantry, a
proof, were any wanting, that the ostentatious absurdities of the poets
of Germany were but bad and paltry imitations. The French
Alexandrine was also brought into vogue by this school, whose
immorality was carried to the highest pitch by Günther, the lyric poet,
who, in the commencement of the eighteenth century, opposed
marriage, attempted the emancipation of the female sex, and, with
criminal geniality, recommended his follies and crimes, as highly
interesting, to the world. To him the poet, Schnabel, the author of an
admirable romance, the "Island of Felsenburg," the asylum, in another
hemisphere, of virtue, exiled from Europe, offers a noble contrast.
Three Catholic poets of extreme originality appear at the close of the

seventeenth century, Angelus Silesius (Scheffler of Breslau), who gave
to the world his devotional thoughts in German Alexandrines; Father
Abraham a Sancta Clara (Megerle of Swabia), a celebrated Viennese
preacher, who, with comical severity, wrote satires abounding with wit
and humorous observations; and Balde, who wrote some fine Latin
poems on God and nature. Prätorius, A.D. 1680, the first collector of
the popular legendary ballads concerning Rübezahl and other spirits,
ghosts and witches, also deserves mention. The Silesian, Stranizki, who,
A.D. 1708, founded the Leopoldstadt theatre at Vienna, which
afterward became so celebrated, and gave to it the popular comic style
for which it is famous at the present day, was also a poet of extreme
originality. Gottsched appeared as the hero of Gallomania, which was
at that time threatened with gradual extinction by the Spanish and
Hamburg romance and by Viennese wit. Assisted by Neuber, the
actress, he extirpated all that was not strictly French, solemnly burned
Harlequin in effigy at Leipzig, A.D. 1737, and laid down a law for
German poetry, which prescribed obedience to