or disunion, at others in a more expansive and consequential survey, employing therewith rhythms adapted to song or the recurrence of rhymes easily intelligible and without any considerable complexity. Inasmuch, however, as it possesses for the most part as its content what is essentially transitory we are not to suppose that a nation is likely to sing the same songs over and over again, for a hundred or a thousand years. A people which can at all claim progressive development is neither so poor nor so so barren as only to possess poets of the song at one period of its life. It is just the poetry of the song, which, in contrast to the Epopaea, does not so much die as it is forever being awakened anew. This field of blossom starts up afresh every spring; and it is only in the case of oppressed peoples, peoples precluded from every advance, which are unable to experience the ever requickened delight in poetic composition, that the old and the oldest songs are retained. The particular song, just like the particular mood, arises, and then passes; it animates, delights, and is forgotten. Whoever knows or sings, for example, the songs which fifty years ago were everywhere known and beloved? Every century strikes its own particular keynote; the previous one sounds out of tune, until it stops altogether. None the less, however, must every song possess not so much a revelation of the personality of the singer as a certain community of sentiment, which meets with response from all sides; which excites in others a like emotion and so, too, passes from mouth to mouth. Songs which are not generally current as such in their time are seldom of the genuine stamp. As an essential distinction in the composition of song I will merely emphasize two main aspects which I have already referred to. On the one hand the poet may express his inner life in its emotions quite openly and without reserve, more especially the feelings and state of joyfulness, and so that he communicates completely all that he experiences. On the other hand, and in extreme contrast to this, he may only suffer us to surmise through his very speechlessness, what is brought to a focus in the unopened chamber of his heart. The first type belongs mainly to the East, and more especially to the careless hilarity and contented expansiveness of Mohammedan poetry, the splendid outlook of which loves to dilate itself hither and thither in all the breadth of sensuous perception and witty conceit. The second type, on the contrary, applies with more force to our Northern self-concentration and intimacy of soul-life, which in its compressed tranquillity is often only able to seize hold of objects which are wholly external and to put suggestions in _them,_ while the essentially suppressed spirit is unable to express itself or find a bent, but rather, like the child with whom that father in the Erl King rides through the night and the wind, dies away with its glow on the wick.