Rosegger is a true prophet, he never disguises truth in defending it. His passion for essential Peasantry is too great for sentimentalities, too honest for whitewash; and so while he exhilarates us with its elemental force he does not fear to show where this merges into brutality, nor when its simplicity opens the door to superstition. And yet in the end we are one with his faith in _Bauernthum_ and the world's need of it. The land-folk who emigrate to cities, and their children there born, are fast losing and will soon quite lose what no money or experience can compensate them for. Age after age, great shaping influences from the forest, the mountain and the waters of the mountain, the solitudes, the mastery and love of beasts, the disciplinary tragedies and triumphs of agriculture, came and wrought upon the humanity in their midst, gradually creating the customs, traditions, lore and art--everything except religion in its _Church_ sense--which is part of the collective soul of Peasantry. Whatever these uprooted land-folk gain in the city, though they gain the whole world, they certainly lose their own soul--the soul special to Peasantry and until now the fullest spring of the world's imaginative life. At times, perhaps when he has stayed too long in Graz, Rosegger writes of _Bauernthum_ as of something irrevocably passing; at others he utters his faith--for it is deeper than hope--that it will come again. To him his own life is racially prophetic. He has had the best of civilisation, intellectual intercourse, fame, travel, wealth: but from these and all others of its benefits or lures, he has again and again run back, mastered by a _Heimweh_ which saved him. Sometimes, in terrible trouble, once at the point of death, he went back, and every time the touch of the earth renewed him, body and soul. Signs of this saving _Heimweh_ he sees here and there among those who remain at the banquet, actually starving in satiety, some of them; and from the quiet valley where his genius, long since the consecrated champion of the ancient peasantry, does its best work, he calls upon these to come back and make possible a new. His loyal traditionalism does not hinder his belief that a new peasantry, not born, but becoming such from a choice inspired by heart's hunger and a surfeit of civilisation, must have a strong redemptive value of its own among the decadent nations.