"All we poets are foresters and woodwards in the great forest of mankind," said once Berthold Auerbach, another poet of the people, to Rosegger. Such a one the editor of the _Heimgarten_ feels himself to be, expending, as he does, all his ripe experience and loving care upon the husbandry which has been entrusted to him. To protect the vanishing traditional customs of his forefathers, their natural conceptions of right and wrong, the blessing of family life, their healthy contentment--the outcome of bodily toil and the love of the home--against the demoralisation of modern hyperculture, is his most earnest aim. The principal heroes of his romances are by preference those whose calling involves the task of cherishing and teaching the people: schoolmasters and priests. The _Writings of the Forest Schoolmaster_ (1878) is the name of Rosegger's most popular work, which already in 1908 appeared in its seventy-eighth edition, and which, let us hope, may within the author's lifetime still reach its hundredth edition. The theme is the gradual emergence of a forest parish from a group of demoralised and utterly uneducated men to a social organisation, to a lawful and religiously organised community. A similar _Kulturroman_ is _Der Gottsucher_ (_The God-seeker_, 1883), which leads us back into past centuries. A parish has been excommunicated by the Church for murdering its priest. The people cannot exist without religion, and, deprived of their old church, they create a new one, a religion of Nature, by means of which the leader of the community brings back order and industry to the village. The third novel belonging to this series, _Das Ewige Licht_ (_The Light Eternal_, 1897), is a pessimistic counterpart to the _Waldschulmeister_. This treats of the dangers to religion which arise from modern civilisation. The faithful priest of a mountain parish has to look on helplessly while the modern world thrusts itself into the mountain idyll; while the atmosphere of the great cities, brought up by mountain climbers and summer visitors, and the smoke from the chimneys of the ever-spreading industrialism in the valleys below, poison the pure air, and, morally and economically, ruin the old inhabitants.