It was from the heart of this life that Theodore Körner sprung, for the cause of his country and mankind, and sung and fought and died; it was from this that Goethe and Schiller, Hauff and Tieck, and a thousand others, have issued to glorify valour, or consecrate patriotism, or beautify the regions of the human soul by their songs and their imaginative prose. It was from this that the whole body of ardent youth arose, and quitting their Kneips and their Chores, called all their country to reassert its liberty, to drive out its foes, and at the people's head, fought with the spirit of the ancient heroes, and chased from their soil for ever, the tyrant and overrunner of humbled Europe. And yet there are those who are continually forgetting these things; asserting that all the student songs, and student clanship, and student freedom, end in smoke and vapour, and without any permanent result, and that they depart at the termination of their academical career their several ways, and sink into obscurity and insignificance. What! would they not have them become good citizens, sober judges, domestic men? But they who say that no high effects remain, know nothing of the youth of Germany. They cannot have seen how the new Rhine-song went through the whole country like an electric flash when France threatened to march to the banks of that noble river, and how every German student vowed if such a deed were perpetrated, they would go forth and fight to a man. They cannot know, as I do, that the loves and friendships formed by these youths are more permanent and indissoluble than any class of men with whom I have yet become acquainted; nor that in private society, where, and in my own house, I have seen much of them, they are amongst the most accomplished, gentlemanly, temperate, correctly-mannered, cordial-hearted, and intellectual men that European society possesses. But all such persons I willingly turn over to the perusal of this volume, the work of a young but learned author, who has recently passed, by a splendid examination, out of this student-life itself without having ever fought a single duel, or very probably got half or even quarter seas over. If the perusal of this volume should have the good effect of lessening amongst the German youth the tendency to the beer or the sword duel, and of inspiring our English youth with a more intellectual and poetical taste in their pleasures, certainly we may say, in the style of all good old prefaces, "that it will not have been written in vain." _Heidelberg, April 6th_, 1841. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I.