novel writing. Seldom has the short story been handled more skilfully
and felicitously than by such men as Paul Heyse, Gottfried Keller, C.
F. Meyer, Theodor Storm. Seldom has the novel of tragic import and
passion been treated with greater refinement and delicacy than in such
works as Fontane's _Effi Briest_, Ricarda Huch's _Ludolf Ursleu_,
Wilhelm von Polenz's _Der Büttnerbauer_, or Ludwig Thoma's _Andreas
Vöst_. And it may be doubted whether, at the present moment, there is
any country where the novel is represented by so many gifted writers
or exhibits such exuberant vitality, such sturdy truthfulness, such
seriousness of purpose, or such a wide range of imagination as in
contemporary Germany.

All these dramatists, lyric poets, and novelists, and with them not a
few essayists, philosophers, orators, and publicists,[1] of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries will speak in the following volumes
to America and other countries of the English language. They have been
arranged, in the main, chronologically. The first three volumes have
been given to the mature work of Goethe and Schiller--time-tested and
securely niched. Volumes IV and V contain the principal Romanticists,
including Fichte and Schelling; Volume VI brings Heine, Grillparzer,
and Beethoven to view;

Volume VII, Hegel and Young Germany; Volume VIII, Auerbach, Gotthelf,
and Fritz Reuter; Volume IX, Hebbel and Ludwig; Volume X, Bismarck,
Moltke, Lassalle. Of the second half of the collection there might be
singled out: Volume XIV (Gottfried Keller and C.F. Meyer); Volume XV
(Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Emperor William II.); Volume XVIII
(Gerhart Hauptmann, Detlev von Liliencron, Richard Dehmel). The last
two volumes will be devoted to the most recent of contemporary authors.