Another famous political poet whose acquaintance I made when he was an old man was Moritz Arndt. His poetry was not very great, but the effect which he produced by his “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland” has been, and is still, perfectly marvellous. If Bismarck finished the unity of Germany, Arndt laid the foundation of it, and in the grateful memory of the people his song will probably be remembered long after Bismarck’s diplomatic triumphs have been forgotten. I shall never forget old Arndt, for, old as he was, he gave me such a grip of the hand that I thought the blood would squirt from my nails. Lesser poets and writers whom I knew at that time, while I was a student at Leipzig, were Karl Beck, of Hungarian extraction, Robert Blum (_fusillé_ at Vienna by Windischgrätz, 9th November, 1848), Herlossohn, Kühne, Laube, and several more whose names I could find in Histories of German Literature, or the Conversations-Lexicon, but no longer in the camera obscura of my memory. And yet some of their poems were really beautiful, full of high thoughts and deep feeling. But the world does not recognise a poet of one poem, or even of ten or twenty. In order to be a poet a man must produce hundreds of poems, volume after volume, good, bad, and indifferent. Nor is there here anything like the survival of the fittest. Although ever so many of Schiller’s or Goethe’s poems have become old and antiquated—few will deny this—yet no one is satisfied with a selection of the best, few people would ever agree as to which are the best. We must take them all or none. In that respect the ancient poets are certainly much better off. What is left of Tyrtaeos or Sappho, or of Horace and Catullus, can be carried in our waistcoat pocket, nay, in the folds of our brains; and though even here sifting might increase enjoyment, yet we can take in whatever there is without sinking under the burden. But who can remember Goethe or Wordsworth or Victor Hugo, aye, who has time even to read all their verses, so as to mark, learn, and inwardly digest them?