Let us now examine what Theodor Körner and Heinrich von Kleist have accomplished, in the first place, as lyric poets. Kleist (unhappily) has left us very little in this field, Körner (again unhappily) all the more. Körner's war-songs have, in this stage of our investigation, the precedence over his other lyric productions, for two reasons: in the first place, they found the largest public and earned for their author, beside the royalties, the title of a German Tyrtaeus; and in the second place, Theodor Körner's soul was most ardently engrossed with the supposed and the real sufferings of his time, with the dignity and the misfortune of his people, and with the necessity and sacredness of the war. Let no one scent any bombast in all this, but, on the contrary, let him admire my cleverness in condensing into three lines, everything that Theodor Körner expressed in a whole volume, in _Lyre and Sword_! If, therefore, his war-songs are bad, we shall be justified in concluding that we need expect still less from his other poems, in which he is concerned with sentiments which certainly affected him more slightly than those which placed the sword in his hand. I turn over the index of his war-songs, and find _Call to the German Nation, Before the Battle, Germany_,--in short, titles that all point to material very often handled, and therefore grown trivial. I do not, indeed, immediately conclude therefrom that the poems are trivial, but I have the right to conclude that the man who attempts such worn out subjects must be either a very great or a very small poet. May I be permitted to analyze one of these poems? I will choose, as the most significant, the well known _Battle Song of the Confederation_. In this poem the poet has striven to collect everything that could serve to make the soldiers who were to take part in the battle of Danneberg more indifferent to the bullets. I should not, however, have liked to advise the commanding general actually to use it for this purpose. Mr. Körner quite forgets with what sort of people he is dealing when, in the third strophe, he expects the soldiers to let themselves be slaughtered for German art and German song. This is more than a joke, for I have the right to demand that a _Battle-Song_ of the Confederation shall be comprehensible and intelligible to all who are to take part in the battle; and art and song are, in any case, not important enough to be named together with the causes that made the fighting of a battle necessary, together with the enslavement of a people; quite apart from the fact that both, art and song, belong to those national treasures which are most secure in the time of hostile invasion. But in order not to give my logic a bad reputation, I will begin at the beginning. Mr. Körner not only began there but even ended there--this in parenthesis. The first strophe aims to give the picture of a battle; but it is fortunate that we already