But there was one great man who, foreigner though he was, influenced German intellectual life by his personality, writings, and actions more than any of the famous men of the past. This was Lord Byron. It was long before men's eyes in Germany were opened to his artistic weaknesses and deficiencies. Gutzkow alone, about the year 1835, begins to criticise him discerningly. But the Byron whom Goethe had admired and shown favour to (though principally because of that in him which the old master attributed to his own influence), Byron, with his contempt for the real negation of liberty that lay concealed beneath the "wars of liberty" against Napoleon, with his championship of the oppressed, his revolt against social custom, his sensuality and spleen, his passionate love of liberty in every domain, transfigured by his death as a liberator, seemed to the men of that day to be an embodiment of all that they understood by the modern spirit, modern poetry. Wilhelm Müller, the poet of the _Griechenlieder_, sings of him with fervent enthusiasm: "Siebenunddreissig Trauerschüsse? Und wen haben sie gemeint? Sind es siebenunddreissig Siege, die er abgekämpft dem Feind? Sind es siebenunddreissig Wunden, die der Held trägt auf der Brust? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Siebenunddreissig Jahre sind es, welche Hellas heut beweint! Sind' die Jahre, die du lebtest? Nein um diese wein ich nicht: Ewig leben diese Jahre in des Ruhmes Sonnenlicht, Auf des Liedes Adlerschwingen, die mit nimmer müdem Schlag Durch die Bahn der Zeiten rauschen, rauschend grosse Seelen wach. Nein, ich wein um andre Jahre, Jahre die du nicht gelebt, Um die Jahre, die für Hellas du zu leben hast gestrebt: Solche Jahre, Monde, Tage kündet mir des Donners Hall, Welche Lieder, welche Kämpfe, welche Wunden, welchen Fall! Einen Fall im Siegestaumel auf den Mauern von Byzanz, Eine Krone dir zu Füssen, auf dem Haupt der Freiheit Kranz!"[1]