Both in broad outline and in minute detail this first of the peasant novels is sterling poetry. The influence of fantastic Romanticism is still distinct; the secret tribunal, the sword of Charlemagne, the enthusiasm for old customs are Romantic features; even Lisbeth's fanciful pedigree--the fathering of this truthful young being on the old liar Münchhausen--betrays that the tale is an outgrowth of an earlier Romantic literature. All this, however, only throws into stronger relief the laborious, yet vigorous, process of condensation by which healthy, modern realistic appreciation and treatment of popular subjects was evolved out of the arbitrary fantasticality which immediately preceded it. Immermann is one of the company of authors, including Daniel Defoe, l'Abbé Prévost, the Danish poet Wessel, Chamisso, and Bernardin de St. Pierre, who prove that a single volume is enough to carry a writer's name down to posterity, even if everything else that he has written be quickly forgotten. As a matter of fact, only this one work of Immermann's lives. He wrote mock-heroic poems, such as _Tulifäntchen_, which was much appreciated in its day, but is now unreadable. He wrote works which, for their day, must be pronounced meritorious, but which are now given over to moth and rust, such as the drama _Merlin_ (1831), a great Romantic work in well-written verse, a sort of unsuccessful pendant to the Second Part of Goethe's _Faust_ and the historic tragedy which was first known as _Das Trauerspiel in Tirol_ ("The Tragedy in the Tyrol"), but was re-named _Andreas Hofer_. The second of these plays is the better of the two; it is founded on Immermann's own youthful recollections of the formidable resistance encountered by the French in the Tyrol, and is written with both the ability and the will to present a faithful and impartial picture of the two hostile races, so unlike in their character and in their development. This work in its original form, as published in 1826, criticised by Börne in his _Dramaturgische Blätter_, and satirised by Platen in _Der romantische Oedipus_, is interesting, especially as a sort of mongrel, the offspring of Kleist's genius mated with Schiller's muse; for the hero reminds us of Schiller's _Wilhelm Tell_, and the love affair between the Frenchman and the Tyrolese girl, with its tragic ending, of Kleist's _Die Hermannschlacht_. But the play was too devoid of any really profound, impressive originality to live long, and when, in 1831, Immermann re-wrote it, suppressing everything that had given offence or called forth adverse criticism--the whole love-story and the incident (again recalling Kleist) of the sword which the angel restored to Hofer in a dream--he himself took away what life there was in it. Pride, if nothing else, should have made him retain the character which Platen had tauntingly nicknamed the "Depeschenmordbrandehebruchstyrolerin."