deprived of her first betrothed by the guillotine; and, at another,
in furnishing a telling contrast between the revolutionary uproar
in France and the settled peace of the German village.

The characters of the father and the minister Goethe took over
from the original incident, the mother he invented, and the
apothecary he made to stand for a group of friends. But all of
these persons, as well as the two lovers, are recreated, and this
so skillfully that while they are made notably familiar to us as
individuals, they are no less significant as permanent types of
human nature. The hexameter measure which he employed, and which
is retained in the present translation, he handled with such
charm that it has since seemed the natural verse for the domestic
idyl--witness the obvious imitation of this, as of other
features of the poem, in Longfellow's "Evangeline."

Taken as a whole, with its beauty of form, its sentiment, tender
yet restrained, and the compelling pathos of its story, "Hermann
and Dorothea" appeals to a wider public than perhaps any other
product of its author.




HERMANN AND DOROTHEA


CALLIOPE

FATE AND SYMPATHY