The underlying theme of Raabe's writings is the inner life of the individual man and his specifically human sphere of family, society, community, nation. With this he combines a strong preference for what is characteristically German, which he loves just as much where it is merely German, in fact, German to the point of being odd and bizarre, as where it merges into the universally human. Raabe believes, however, that both the peculiarly German and the broadly human types are found with greater richness and depth among the Germans of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century than among those of the last third. The period before the development of modern Germany is that in which he loves best to linger. When he forsakes it, he does so to go still farther back, into the realm of history proper. What was it that interested Raabe in history? Not so much the causal connection of events; not so much historical growth, as historical conditions. And, moreover, to him the outward circumstances are merely the necessary premises for what he really wishes to grasp, the spirit of a period, the constitution of the folk-soul. The great historical figures who led up to a period and stand out prominently in it he pushes into the background. It is the forgotten men and women that he seeks, and he pictures how circumstances or events ordered their lives, whether the individual lived apart from his age and contrasted with the mass, or whether the "milieu" wrought in him a particular condition of mind and heart, so that he was drawn into situations and events, into the "Zeitgeist," without actually exercising any decisive influence. In _Else von der Tanne_ the German peasants, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, are sunk in "brutish stupor," inwardly and outwardly coarsened and demoralized, filled with boundless suspicion. When Else, "the purest, holiest flower in the horrible devastation of the earth," appears among them, they look upon her as something monstrous, they make a witch of her, and under their stoning the gentle miracle falls stricken at the threshold of the house of God. In _Sankt Thomas_ the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands kindles heroism in the heart of a woman who, like a phenomenon, interposes in the fight, in which she perishes after all, without being able to give its course a favorable turn. "That was no longer that Camilla who had swung in the hammock. * * * She now appeared as the beautiful but deadly genius of this island; it was as if the destructive power of the tropical sun had become embodied in her. * * * Camilla Drago, in league with the fire from heaven, defended the castell Pavaosa." In _The Crown of the Realm_ the heroine feels the necessity of making her lover go through the campaigns in Bohemia and Hungary from where he returns afflicted with leprosy. He gives up his happiness for lost, but the girl, from whom he has hidden, finds him, acknowledges her love for him, nurses him until