tragedy of the last Buddenbrook, Hanno, whose delicate sensibility is crushed out by the discipline of the school. A few years later there, appeared in Hermann Hesse's _On the Rack_ (1906) another story of schoolboy martyrdom, and between these two pessimistic works lay two sunshiny novels of childhood, _Asmus Semper's Childhood Land_ (1904), by Otto Ernst, and _Gottfried Kämpfer_ (1904), by Hermann Anders Krüger. These were the most successful novels of those years; Strauss' _Death the Comforter_ is, next to the conclusion of _Buddenbrooks_, the poetically most significant of these stories of childhood. The writer, rich in comprehension of the vitality of the problems and in the delicacy of his treatment of them, has not had to repeat himself: his novel _Friction_ (1904) is a fine psychological study in the form of a love story, in which life undertakes the education of two recalcitrant lovers; and his latest work, _The Naked Man_ (1912), is a powerful historical novel. Hermann Hesse, who is often grouped with Strauss, is, in spite of his belonging to the same stock, a different nature; he is more of a lyricist, and his lyrical poems, though less well known, take perhaps a higher rank than his novels. Even in these the lyrical mood outweighs the human action; he ponders the riddles of nature more earnestly than the riddles of humanity. Among human beings, however, his favorite is the gentle St. Francis of Assisi, to whom he has devoted a splendid little book. Hesse was born in 1877 at Calw in Württemberg; it is his own youth that he describes in the novel _On the Rack_. After fleeing from the Theological Seminary at Moulbronn he became a machinist; then he worked in a bookstore at Basel, where he found opportunity to study at the University. He spent a few years at Munich, and finally made Switzerland his home by establishing himself in the neighborhood of Bern. In respect to literary relations he had even before this acquired a certain right to be called a Swiss; for his work may be regarded as a continuation of the line of development that runs from Jean Paul to Gottfried Keller. There is a kind of resurrection of Jean Paul in the wonderful descriptions of nature, the dreams of universal love and natural piety, which we find in Hesse's first great novel _Peter Camenzind_ (1904); no writer since Jean Paul has bestowed such eloquent praise upon the clouds: