The success of this first production was complete. It was published at the time when the 'incense perfume of the pious soul,' as Scheffel calls the poems of Oskar von Redwitz, had its firmest hold on the misguided taste of the public. In comparison with this sickly, effeminate poetry, the simple, natural, and yet intensely poetic production of Scheffel afforded something like the enjoyment of fresh mountain air after that of a hot-house. It is true, Scheffel was at first entirely ignored by the Berlin and Leipzig critics who assume to sit in judgment over modern German literature (he has, up to the present day, not even found a place in Brockhaus's _Conversations-Lexicon_), but the unsophisticated public recognized the kernel of pure poetry in Scheffel's unpretentious verses; and his 'Trompeter' is at present the most popular poem in Germany. Its story is told with extreme simplicity and humour, in blank trochees with interspersed rhymed poems; it leads us to the forest-town of Säckingen during the second half of the 17th century, and into the neighbouring castle of a baron, whose only daughter is wooed and, at last, won by a young musician, a merry youth, who had been expelled from the University of Heidelberg on account of his noisy behaviour. Nothing can be more humorous than the account of the ex-student's life at Heidelberg, of his duels and his libations beneath the big tun of the castle, Bei dem Wunder unserer Tage, Bei dem Kunstwerk deutschen Denkens, Bei dem Heidelberger Fass, or the historical episode of the foundation of Säckingen by Saint Fridolin, an Irish apostle, sent by Chlodwig with the following message to convert the Allemannic Germans: Hatt' sonst nicht die grösste Vorlieb Für die Kutten, für die Heil'gen, Aber seit mir die verfluchten Scharfen Alemannenspiesse Allzunah um's Ohr gepfiffen, Seit der schweren Schlacht bei Zülpich, Bin ich and'rer Ansicht worden, --Noth lehrt auch die Könige beten. Schutz drum geb' ich, wo ihr hinzieht. Und empfehl' hauptsächlich Euch am Oberrhein die Alemannen. Diese haben schwere Schädel, Diese sind noch trotz'ge Heiden, Macht mir diese fromm und artig-- or the meditations of the cat of the castle, which, as silent witness of the caresses of the two lovers, thus broods over the enigma of the kiss: