The most notable of the freedom-loving poets and prose authors of the period are embodiments of some of the shades of opinion which have been alluded to. Adalbert von Chamisso, who, by virtue of his famous prose tale, _Peter Schlemihl_, and certain of his qualities, belongs to the German Romantic School, while in other respects he approaches more nearly to the French ideal of thought and writing, is, in some of his most characteristic poems, and even in his epigrams, a mouthpiece of the grief of the better sort over the steadily growing political and social reaction. As early as 1822, in his poem, _Die goldene Zeit_ ("The Golden Age"), he ridicules an age in which that man is a Jacobin who has openly expressed his belief that 2 and 2 make 4; in the _Nachtwächterlied_ ("Watchman's Song") he scoffs at the power of the Jesuits; in _Joshua_ and _Das Dampfross_ ("The Steam Horse"), at those who have robbed time of its secret, and learned how to force it backwards day by day; in _Das Gebet der Wittwe_ ("The Widow's Prayer") he gives a darkly pessimistic picture of the heartless rule of the powers that be, with its complete indifference to the fate of the common people; finally he sums up his view of the times in this bitterly humorous quatrain, which greets us sadly in the form of a four-part catch: KANON. "Das ist die Noth der schweren Zeit! Das ist die schwere Zeit der Noth! Das ist die schwere Noth der Zeit! Das ist die Zeit der schweren Noth!"[1] Count August von Platen-Hallermünde, whose youthful efforts were Romantic, both in their choice of subject and in their imitation of the forms of the Spanish drama, afterwards waged systematic war with Romanticism. Its latest developments in Germany he holds up to ridicule, without possessing enough of critical tact to discriminate between the authors who did and those who did not belong to the Romanticist group. He quits the literary drama to cultivate the political lyric muse, as he gradually arrives at the conviction that the pitiable condition of public affairs is also at the bottom of the German people's lack of appreciation of power and style and form in poetry. He finds life in Germany impossible to endure, and seeks, under the sunny skies of Sicily, amidst its reminiscences of antiquity, to forget the heavy atmosphere and the political abuses of his Northern home. But he cannot completely distract his thoughts from the ignominy there. He writes his Berlin national song, which begins with the chorus: "Diesen Kuss den Moscoviten, Deren Nasen sind so schmuck; Rom mit seinen Jesuiten Nehme diesen Händedruck!"[2] We find also the following bitter outburst of national self-contempt, written in wrath over the maltreatment of his poems by the censor: "Doch gieb, o Dichter, dich zufrieden, Es büsst die Welt nur wenig ein; Du weisst es längst, man kann hienieden Nichts Schlechtres als ein Deutscher sein."[3]