[3] "From wherever I am, field, forest, valley, meadow, or mountain-top, I send a thousand greetings to my fair and noble lady. In my garden I gather the loveliest flowers that blow; I bind them into wreaths, and bind along with them a thousand thoughts and greetings. I may not give her my flowers; she is too great and beautiful; they wither, every one, but love lives eternally in my heart. In seeming cheerfulness I go about my daily task; my heart is breaking, but I dig and sing, and soon I'll dig my grave." [4] "Fly, cockchafer, fly! Your father is in the wars; your mother is in Pommerland, and Pommerland is on fire. Fly, cockchafer, fly!" XIV ARNIM AND BRENTANO Herder's _Stimmen der Völker_ ("Voices of the Nations"), published in 1767, contained only twenty German "Volkslieder;" but at the time he brought it out, he expressed the wish that he might live to see the publication of a large collection of the old "Nationallieder," as he called them. In 1806 L. A. von Arnim and Clemens Brentano published the first volume of _Des Knaben Wunderhorn_; it contained 210 German popular songs and ballads, and was followed in 1808 by two more volumes of about the same size. This book was not only of the greatest historical interest, but was epoch-making in German lyric poetry and German literature generally. It struck that natural note which for many years gave freshness and sonority to both the Romantic and the ante-Romantic lyric poetry. Even when, in the case of Heine, the entirely modern had supplanted the Romantic theme, rhythm and form and many hardly noticeable turns of expression owed their simple charm to the inspiration of the Volkslied. The superiority of German to French lyric poetry in this century possibly lies chiefly in that absence of everything rhetorical which it owes to the influence of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Though the two publishers of this great collection were of one accord in their love for the old popular poetry of their country, and also as to the slightly modernised and carefully expurgated form in which the songs were to appear, and though both were thorough-going Romanticists in principle, they were men of very different characters. Ludwig Achim von Arnim was born in Berlin in 1781. He studied natural science for some time in Göttingen, and then travelled all over Germany, to make himself acquainted with the country and the people and to collect popular songs and ballads. After this he settled for a time in Heidelberg, where he met Clemens Brentano and Görres. In company with them, in 1808, he started a literary periodical, the Einsiedlerzeitung ("Hermit's Chronicle"), amongst the contributors to which were Tieck, Uhland, Hölderlin, and Jacob Grimm. This periodical he continued at a later time under the title _Trösteinsamkeit_ ("Consolation in Solitude").