Just so far have many thinking people come to-day, and there remain, needing a leader who can turn regretful retrospect to rational hope. Such a one is Peter Rosegger, whose life is a type of our own day and a prophecy of better. He, too, left the land for the city, and now, because all his culture and experience do but confirm his faith that _Bauernthum_ is as necessary for the world's soul as the bread which the peasant grows for its body, he has gone back to it. When he wants new vigour for daily life, or for his mission of protecting and pleading for a vanishing folk, he touches earth and gets it. Peasant-born, in most of his books he _is_ Peasantry grown conscious and articulate,--he gives us that life from within. But culture has enabled him to see the peasant in his true relation to the world as well, to measure the life he was born into with the civilisation whose guest he has been. And so in one invaluable book, _Erdsegen_, he writes of the folk life from without, and that with great truth and consistency. The story is given in a series of letters from a city journalist, who for a frivolous wager goes to live "the simple life" as a peasant among peasants for one year. Looking through the townsman's eyes, we find there no stage-peasant's Arcady, no rose-bowered cottages pleasantly ready for week-end lodgers; rather we stare aghast at the coarse food, rough work, some very unwholesome conditions, and obstinate superstitions. The journalist's earlier letters treat of these things with humorous realism, and we respect his pluck for putting up with them. Gradually the tone of the letters changes, and we see the innate fineness--not the cultured refinement--of the townsman, responding to the strong faith behind the superstition, to the beauty of the traditional labours, the heroic endurance of their undoing by storm and bad fortune, and the acceptance of good and ill alike as from the hands of a good if sometimes incomprehensible Father. The faint sneer, even the amused smile, die from the townsman's face; dirt and discomfort are lost sight of in the divine realities which draw him, humbly enough at last, to throw in his lot with these humble people.