in a wholly lyrical manner, to express under the form of an event, in order thereby to affect the hearts of his readers with a similar lyric movement of feeling and contemplation.
(_β_) The purely _personal_ element of lyric poetry is rightly emphasized in those cases, when the fact of a given situation is taken by the poet as an effective means of expressing his _own_ individuality therein. Such is the case in the so-called poems _d'occasion._ So far back as the poems of Callinus and Tyrtaeus we find elegies of battle based on conditions regarded as real, which are made the stimulus of a personal enthusiasm, albeit the poet's own individuality, his purely private affections and feelings, are as yet not so much in evidence. The Pindaric Odes also bring to light in their panegyrics of particular contests, victors, and circumstances, a vein or impulse that is more private; and yet more in some of the odes of Horace we mark a definitely personal motive, or rather expressed thought to the effect, "I will as myself a man of culture and fame, write a poem on this subject." But the best illustration of all we have in our own Goethe, whose partiality for such a style was due to the fact that he discovered a poem in every incident of his life.
(_αα_) If, however, the lyric work of art is to be divested of all _dependence_ of external occasion and purpose, that may be implied in it, and to be composed as a self-subsistent whole on its own account, it is obviously essential that the poet also only make use of such external stimulus as an opportunity to express _himself,_ his mood, delight, sorrow, or modes of thought and reflection generally. The condition of most importance to such an intimate mode of personal expression consists in the poet's ability to absorb the real content absolutely, converting it thereby into his own possession. The true lyric poet lives a life of introspection, he grasps relations in the light of his poetic individuality; and, however in varied fashion his inner life may be blended with the world around him, in its conditions and destiny, what he presents to us exclusively in such material is the unique and independent animation of his own emotions and observations.
When, to take our former example, Pindar was invited to celebrate a victor of the Hellenic games, or undertakes this uninvited, he made himself so entirely master of his subject-matter, that his composition no longer so much appears a poem _on_ the victor as an effusion of song created from his own resources.
(_ββ_) If we consider more closely the manner of presentment of such a poem _d'occasion,_ we shall, no doubt, be ready to admit that the same can to a real extent borrow its more defined material and character, no less than its conceived organization as an artistic work, from the actual features of the occurrence or individual which constitute its content. It is, in fact, precisely from this content that the emotional movement of the poet proceeds. As the most illuminating, though an extreme example, I will merely mention Schiller's "Song of the Bell," which makes out of the varied stages of bell-foundry the significant and arresting moments in the composition of the entire poem, and only subject to this introduces the emotional element relevant thereto, as also the various observations upon human life and the description of its conditions. In a somewhat different manner, too, Pindar makes use of the place of birth of the victor, the exploits of the family to which he belongs, or other relations of life as an opportunity in his own person to exalt certain gods to the exclusion of others, or to mention these particular exploits and results alone, or to emphasize exclusively the observations or maxims he has interpolated. From a further point of view, however, the lyric poet is absolutely free, inasmuch as it is not the external occasion as such, but rather the poet's _own_ soul-life which is here the subject; and consequently it entirely depends on the particular views of the poet and the character of his general mood, what aspects of the subject-matter and in what threads of connection and sequence they shall be composed. In other words, we are unable to predict decisively and _a priori_ the degree in which the objective occasion with its given content, or the purely personal factor of poet, shall be predominant, or whether both aspects shall on equal terms coalesce.
(_γγ_) Furthermore, it is not the incentive and its positive reality, but the ideal movement and conception of the individual soul which supplies the _focus of unity._ The particular mood or general review, which is aroused poetically by the occasion, these constitute the centre, radiating from which not merely the colour of the whole, but also the embrace of the particular features unfolded, the very mode of the execution and construction, and therewith the build and coalescence of the poem as a work of art are determined. In this way, to return to our previous example, Pindar possesses in the life-conditions of his victors a genuine core of reality for differentiation or amplification. In the particular poems, however, which he has written it is invariably other points of view, another mood altogether, whether it be of warning, comfort, or exaltation, which he makes most pervasive, and which, although such exclusively belong to the poet in his creative capacity, do none the less give him precisely that grasp of all he wishes to touch upon, execute, and hand to posterity in those historical facts, while unfolding therewith the illuminating and constructive power of genius, without which he would fail to secure the lyric effect intended.
(_γ_) But, _thirdly_, it is not absolutely necessary for the genuine lyrical poet to start from the external occurrence, which he recounts in a medium rich with emotion, or, indeed, from any such objectively real stimulus of his efforts. He is, let us repeat, a truly exclusive world _in himself._ He may find there both the original incentive and content, and consequently go no further than this ideal world of condition, event, and passion discovered in his own heart and soul.
This is that domain in which man becomes, in virtue of his private inner life, himself the work of art; while the epic poet avails himself exclusively of the hero and his exploits and experiences for this purpose.
(_αα_) And yet in this field, too, an element of narrative may enter, where, as in the case of the songs of Anacreon, bright little pictures of adventure with Eros and the like receive the finish of delightful miniatures. Such an event, however, must obviously rather resemble the unveiling of a condition of personal soul-life. In a somewhat different mode of the same thing Horace, in his _Integer vitæ_ makes use of the fact of his meeting a wolf, not to the extent that we can, therefore, call his poem the verse _d'occasion_, but rather regarding this fact as the prompting force of his first sentence and the serenity of the feelings of affection with which he concludes.
(_ββ_) As a rule we may also observe that the situation under which the poet depicts himself should not restrict itself merely to the _inner personal_ life as such. It must rather attest itself as concrete, and thereby we may even say external totality. The poet, in short, reveals himself not merely in that inward personal life, but as one of the objects of the external world. In the example just cited of the Anacreon odes the poet depicts himself among roses, fair maidens, and youths in the merry enjoyment of wine and dance, without regret or yearning, without obligation, and yet without dislike of loftier aims, which, indeed, are not present at all; reveals himself rather as a hero, who freely and without reserve, and consequently without hesitation or loss, is just this unity, is what he is, a man of his own type, and figures as such in this intimate artistic presentment. In the love-songs of Hafis also we may observe the entire vital individuality of the poet in all its changes of content, pose, and an expression which approaches close to self-conscious humour. And yet his poetry is without any specific theme, any objective picture, any god, or mythology; or, rather, when we peruse these light-hearted ebullitions, one feels as though it would be impossible for the Oriental to possess any such definite picture and constructive art. He passes easily from one object to another; he takes his walks abroad, but it is a scene in which the entire man, with his wine, his damsels, his court-life, and all the rest of it, is placed before us with delightful unreserve, without passion or self-seeking in the simplicity of his enjoyment eye to eye and soul to soul. Improvisations of this type adapt themselves in the most various ways not merely to a reflection of the soul-life, but also to external condition. If, however, the poet is absorbed in his own individual experience, we are not so much concerned to hear his particular fancies, love affairs, domestic arrangements, and the history of his uncles and aunts. We are so invited, for instance, in Klopstock's Eidli and Fanny, as to nave some vision given us of what is of universal human interest, in order that our sympathies may be roused. From this point of view, therefore, such lyrical poetry can readily degenerate into the spurious assumption that what is essentially private and particular must necessarily awaken interest.
On the contrary, it would be no incorrect description of many songs of Goethe if we called them "Songs of _Comradeship_," although they are not exactly executed by the poet under such a category. In other words, it is not so much himself that a man offers in society; rather he places his particularity in the background, and converses with the help of something else, whether it be a story or an anecdote, seizing its specific features in some particular mood, and communicating them agreeably to such a temper. In a case like this it is not exactly the poet, and yet it is himself for all that. It is not himself he gives us, but something else as best he can. He is, in short, an actor, who runs through an infinite variety of parts. First he lingers on this, then on that; he reviews momentarily a scene, then maybe a group of people. But whatever he may endeavour to reproduce, it is throughout his individual artistic soul-life, his own experience, his own feeling, which is vitally interwoven with it.
(_γγ_) But, further, in so far as the individuality of self-conscious life is the true source of the Lyric, the poet is justified in limiting his expression to his own moods and reflections without any further combination of them in a concrete situation that includes a truly objective character. It is in this direction that examples of what is little more than an empty fluting for fluting's sake, the song and trill simply on its own account, will yet give us genuine lyrical satisfaction. In such the words are to a more or less extent merely the vehicle of cheerfulness or sorrow, whose effect, moreover, very readily serves as an invitation to musical accompaniment. Folk-songs especially very often amount to little more than this. In the songs of Goethe, too, though we may no doubt discover here a more defined and abundant mode of expression, it is not unfrequently simply a single and transitory bit of merriment that is vouchsafed, a passing mood that the poet does not attempt to throw aside, but on the tune of which he pipes for a moment in his tiny song. In others, of course, his treatment of similar moods is on a larger scale, even systematic, as, for instance, in the poem: "_Ich hab mein Sach' auf nichts gestellt_," in which the poet passes before us as things that come and vanish, first, money and property, then women, travel, fame, honour, and, last of all, fight and war, retaining throughout as the ever-recurring refrain of stability his own free and careless cheerfulness. Conversely, however, the intimate individual life may from the same point of view grow in depth and expansion, in conditions of the soul of the most imposing proportions and ideas that embrace the world itself. A considerable number of Schiller's poems are of this type. What is great, what opens to intelligence, this is the incentive of his heart. But he will neither celebrate in hymn fashion a religious or otherwise profound subject; nor will he be the minstrel who looks for inspiration without him to the pertinent fact or occasion. He sings in the presence of, and inspired by, his own soul-life, the highest interest of which are the ideals of life, beauty, and the imperishable claims and thoughts of our humanity.
(_c_) There is a _third_ consideration we have to deal with in connection with the general character of lyric poetry. It is the nature of the general stage of human development and culture from which the isolated poem originates.
In this respect, too, the Lyric occupies a position which is to be contrasted with Epic poetry. In other words, while we regarded as necessary for the full bloom of the true Epos a phase in the nation's growth which was, speaking generally, undeveloped, at least in the sense that it had not ripened in the prosaic acceptance of its actual life, the times which favour most of all lyrical composition are those which already are in possession of a more or less fixed organization of social condition. It is in such a period that the individual seeks a reflection of his intimate personal life in contrast to this outer world, creating from it and within its limits an independent whole of emotion and idea. For in the Lyric it is not, we repeat, the objective solidarity and individual action, but the individual person as self-conscious life which supplies both content and form. This, however, must not be understood in such a way as though the individual, in order to express himself in lyrical form, must perforce disjoin himself from every connection with national interests and the opinions, and with rigid and exclusive severity remain as he stands.
On the contrary, with such an abstract self-subsistency we should only have left us for content the wholly contingent and particular passion, the mere caprice of concupiscence and affection, false idiosyncrasies and distorted originality would have unlimited opportunities. Genuine lyrical poetry, like all other poetry, has no doubt to express the content of the human heart in its truth. Yet none the less, regarded as the content of the Lyric, what is most a matter of fact and substantial must appear absorbed in personal feeling, vision, imagination, and thought. And, in the _second_ place, the question here is not so much simply expression of the personal inner life, is not so much concerned with a primary and direct statement in the epic fashion, what the facts are, as with an expression of the poetical nature in a manner both artistically fruitful and wholly different from chance and ordinary modes. It follows that the Lyric requires, precisely on account of the fact that the concentrated life of the heart unfolds itself in manifold feelings and comprehensive views, and the individual is conscious of the poetry of his most intimate life as nested in a world that is already more prosaically organized--an artistic culture already secured, which must assert itself as the flower and independent product of the individual's natural endowment thus trained to a perfect result.
For these reasons the Lyric is not limited to particular epochs of the spiritual development of a people, but is the rich blossom of the most varied. To an exceptional degree is it favoured in more recent times, in which everybody is entitled to have and express his own views and emotions.
I will, however, draw attention, in the interest of really important distinction, to the following general considerations.
(_a_) In the _first_ place, we have the type of lyrical expression peculiar to _folk-songs._ (_αα_) In these above all we have witness to the varied and distinct qualities of national character. It is on account of this, and consonant with the widely-prevailing curiosity of our generation, that great efforts are made to collect folk-songs of every kind, in order to increase our acquaintance with the peculiarities of every national spirit, and therewith our sympathies and vital contact with such.
Already Herder has done much in this direction. Goethe, too, with the help of his own more independent imitations, has materially assisted an approach to very different examples of this style of poetry. Complete sympathy is, however, only possible for the songs of one's own people; and however much we Germans are able to make ourselves at home in the work of foreign lands, the fact remains that the ultimate aroma in song[5] of the intimate life of another folk can only appear as alien, that we shall only catch the echo of the tone of feeling that truly belongs to it, with the assistance of a more native reflection of its content.[6] This Goethe has imported into his songs of a foreign subject-matter, stamped as they are with the finest sympathy and beauty. We may take as an example the lament of the noble spouse of Asan Aga, imitated from the Icelandic--only so far as to retain throughout the unique spirit of such poems unimpaired.
(_ββ_) The general character of the lyrical folk-song is comparable to the primitive Epos in virtue of the fact that here too the poet does not make himself his subject-matter, but is absorbed in his selected material. Although, therefore, intensity of soul in its extreme concentration may express itself in the folk-song, it is nevertheless not a single person with the artistic expression of whose private experience we are made acquainted. It is rather a national state of feeling, which the author completely assimilates, in so far as it possesses, when taken by itself, no intimate form of idea or feeling wholly independent of the nation's existence and interests. And a condition is necessary, as the presupposition for such an inseparable union, in which independent personal reflection and culture is not yet awakened, so that the poet is simply in his creative capacity merely the vehicle in the background, by means of whom the national life is expressed in its lyrical emotion and general outlook. This directly primitive character no doubt communicates to the folk-song an unconscious freshness of downright grasp and striking veracity, which is often very effective; but it receives thereby along with it very readily a fragmentary appearance; it is defective in the continuity of its exposition, which may amount to actual obscurity. The feeling dives into depth, but cannot and will not attain to full utterance.
Moreover, as before observed, what is absent from such a point of view throughout, however much the form in general is wholly lyric, in other words subjective, is just the lyrical individuality, which expresses this form and its content as the possession of its _own_ heart and mind, and the creation of its _own_ artistic resources.
(_γγ_) Peoples, therefore, which confine themselves to poetry of this type, and do not combine such composition with that of the further stages of lyrical, epic, or dramatic work, are as a rule in great measure barbarous nations, uncultured, characterized by transitory feud and catastrophes. If they themselves, in such heroic ages, really combined to form a truly pregnant whole, whose particular aspects were already fused together in an independent and withal harmonious objective union, which could supply the ground for essentially concrete and individually distinct exploits, we should find in them, along with such primitive poetry, epic poets as well. The condition, out of which such songs assert themselves as the single and ultimate mode of poetic expression, is therefore rather limited to the field of family life and the association of clans, without any further organization such as belongs already to the riper perfection of the heroic community. If we are reminded here and there of national exploits, such are for the most part conflicts waged against foreign aggressors, expeditions of pillage, reprisals of savagery with savagery, or deeds of one individual against another in the same people, in the narration of which lament and dejection or ecstatic jubilation over one conqueror after another, are the moods throughout prevailing. The national life as it actually is, as yet unfolded in its wholly free development, is relegated to the background in contrast with the world of more personal feeling, which also, on its own account, betrays an immaturity; and, however much thereby we gain in concentration of effect, the result only too frequently remains, so far as content is concerned, rude and barbarous. The question then, whether folk-songs should possess for us a poetic interest, or on the contrary repel us to some extent, depends on the kind of situation and emotion they portray. That which appears admirable to the imagination of one people, will readily strike another as wanting in taste, horrible, and offensive. There is, for example, a folk-song which tells us the story of a wife who was immured at the command of her husband, and all that her plea for mercy could effect was that apertures should be left open for her breasts, in order that she might suckle her child; we are told that she remained alive until her child was weaned. This is a barbarous and frightful situation. And in the same way tales of robbery, exploits of the bluster or sheer savagery of individuals, possess nothing in them in which alien peoples of a higher culture can sympathize.
Folksongs, consequently, very often run into great detail as to the quality of which there is no fixed standard of comparison, because such is too far removed from our common humanity. When we consequently, in more recent times, are made acquainted with the songs of the Iroquois, the Esquimaux, and other wild nationalities, the circle of a true poetic enjoyment is in no wise thereby enlarged.
(_β_) Further, inasmuch as the Lyric is the entire expression of the inward life of Spirit, it can neither restrict itself to the mode of expression nor the content of the genuine folksong, or of later poems composed in a similar spirit.
(_αα_) In other words, on the one hand, it is of essential importance, as already remarked, that the wholly self-absorbed soul should detach itself from this absolute concentration and its direct introspection, and should pass on instead to the free grasp of itself which, in the conditions above described, is only incompletely the case. On the other, it is necessary that it should expand in a world abundant in ideas, passions, varied conditions, and conflicts, in order to endow with ideal expression everything that the human heart is essentially able to apprehend, and then communicate as the birth of its own spirit.
For the collective wealth of lyrical poetry should express in poetic form all that the inner life comprises, so far as the same can pass into poetry, and therefore finds itself at home alike in all phases of spiritual culture.
(_ββ_) And, _secondly_, with the advent of a free self-consciousness is bound up the freedom of an assured _art_ of its own. The folk-song sings forth, just as any natural song, straight from the heart. A free art, however, is aware of itself; it requires a knowledge and desire of that which it produces; and requires culture to promote this knowledge, as also an executive power, which is expert in the finest composition.
When, consequently, genuine epic poetry has to conceal the individual creative power of the poet, or rather it lies with the entire character of the age of its origin that such should not yet be visible, this result is merely because of the fact that the Epos deals with the nation's positive existence rather than that which issues from the personal life of the poet himself, and that it is not present in poetry in such a close personal relation, but rather appears as a self-evolved product essentially independent. In lyrical poetry, on the contrary, the creative activity no less than the content are inseparable from the inner life, and are bound to declare themselves as such in actual fact.
(_γγ_) In this respect, later forms of lyric art are expressly distinguishable from the folk-song. There are, no doubt, folk-songs which originate contemporaneously with the works of a genuine lyrical _art._ These latter, however, belong to a range and type of individuals such as--far from participating in more modern stages of artistic culture--are, in the entire nature of their general outlook, not yet liberated from the immediate popular sense. We must, however, not regard this distinction between the Lyric of the folk-song and the artistic poem as though it was only when reflection and the artistic consciousness, in union with deliberate executive ability, appear with all the elegance of such a union, that the Lyric attains to its perfection. Such a notion would really amount to this--that a Horace, for instance, and the Roman lyric poets generally, were to be reckoned among the finest writers of this type, or even in their own range that the Master Singers were preferable to the preceding epoch of the genuine Minnesong. Such an extreme deduction from our previous statement is not justified. What we ought to conclude is this, that individual imagination and art directed to the service of this very self-consistent personal life, which in fact constitutes its principle, presupposes also, for the basis of their true perfection, a free and self-trained recognition of imaginative idea no less than artistic activity.
(_γ_) We have our _final_ phase of composition to distinguish from those already discussed. The folk-song appears before the true elaboration of a prosaically organized condition of actual conscious life. Lyric poetry of the truly artistic type, on the other hand, wrests itself away from the prosaic coordination which surrounds it, and creates from the poet's imagination, in its acquired independence, a new poetic world of inward observation and emotion, by means of which, for the first time, the true content and type of expression truly adequate to the human soul, as seen from within, becomes the object of vital art. There is, however, over and above this, a form of intelligence which, from this point of view, stands in a more exalted position than the imagination of the emotional or conceptive life, inasmuch as it is able, with more penetrative universality and more necessary coalescence to bring its content before our free cognition than is ever possible to art. This is _philosophical thought._ Conversely, however, this form is attached to the abstract condition of being exclusively evolved in the medium of thought, posited as wholly ideal universality; and, in consequence, the concrete man may find himself also constrained to express the content and the results of his philosophical consciousness in a concrete way, that is, as permeated by his temperament and sensuous perception, his imagination and feeling, in order thereby to possess and exhaust the absolute expression of all that engages either soul or intellect.
From such a standpoint we may distinguish between two principal types of conceptive activity. It may, in short, either be the imagination which, straining beyond its own domain, struggles with the movement of pure thinking, without successfully attaining the clarity and secured exactness of philosophical exposition. In this case the Lyric is for the most part the ebullition of a soul engaged in strife and contention, which in its fermentation does violence both to art and abstract thought. It transgresses one province without the ability to make itself at home in another. Or we may find that it is rather the tranquil movement of philosophical thought in its essential medium, which may seek to animate its clearly grasped and systematically developed thoughts with emotion, to make them perceptible to sensuous apprehension, and to exchange the explicit scientific process and sequence in its causal necessity for that free play of particular aspects, beneath the apparently loose connection of which art is the more compelled to conceal their ideal bonds of association in proportion as it is disinclined to narrow itself to the jejune style of purely didactic exposition. As an illustration of this latter tendency, we may point to many of Schiller's poems.
2. PARTICULAR ASPECTS OF LYRICAL POETRY Having thus considered the general character of the content of lyric poetry, and the mode of its expression, as also the varied grades of culture which are more or less consonant with its fundamental principle, it will be our further task to examine these general points of view more nearly in the _detail_ of their more important features and relations.
Here, too, I ought at starting once again to emphasize the distinction which obtains between epic and lyrical poetry. In our consideration of the former we directed our attention above all to the primitive national Epos, and merely referred incidentally to the inadequate collateral branches, as also to the poet in his creative capacity.
This we are unable to do in the case of the type under discussion. On the contrary, we shall find that subjects of the greatest importance invite our review as respects the individual creative power; and, on the other hand, in respect to the classification of the several types in which lyrical poetry, whose general principle it is to disintegrate and isolate the content and its configurations, is respectively differentiated. We may define the subsequent course of our investigation as follows: _First,_ our attention will be directed to the lyrical poet himself.
_Secondly_, we propose to examine the lyrical work of art as the creation of the individual poet's imagination.
_Thirdly_, we shall classify the types which are deducible from the general notion of lyrical composition.
(_α_) Now the content of the Lyric embraces, as we have seen, first, a type of contemplation, which connects the universal quality of determinate being with its conditions, and, secondly, the manifold character of its detailed aspects. Regarded, however, as pure generalizations and particular points of view of emotional condition these constituents, both of them, are nothing more than abstractions.
In order that these may acquire a vital lyrical individuality, a principle of combination is necessary which can only be of an ideal, in other words really personal[7] character. Consequently the creatively concrete person, the _poet_ himself, must be further presupposed as the focus and in fact realized content of lyrical poetry. He must be there, however, in a form which is not carried to the point of definitive act and deed, or to that of the evolved movement of dramatic conflicts. His exclusive expression and activity is on the contrary restricted to the fact that he endows his inner experience with an articulate speech such as portrays the spiritual significance of himself as subject in his self-expression, whatever the material selected may be, and endeavours to arouse in and keep the hearer alive to the like meaning and spirit, the same soul-state, the similar course of reflection.
(_β_) But, furthermore, the expression cannot rest alone in this result, however successful, in so far as it is for others a free overflooding of buoyant delight, or the resolution and reconciliation of grief in song and lyric, or the yet profounder impulse, which issues in the most serious emotions of heart and the most far-reaching views of intelligence. The man who sings and can write poetry has a necessary vocation thereto. He composes because he _cannot do otherwise._ At the same time the external incentive, the direct invitation and the like are by no means excluded. The great lyric poet, however, in such a case soon swerves aside from such an external stimulus. His supreme object is himself. To take the example once more to which we have constantly recurred, Pindar was frequently invited to celebrate this or that laurel-crowned victor, nay, he frequently accepted payment therefor; and yet, for all that, it is he himself, the minstrel, who changes places with his hero. He combines freely his own unfettered imagination with his praise of the exploits of ancestors, or it maybe his memory of myths; or, when he gives voice to his profound views of life, of wealth, of mastery, of all that is great and deserving, of the supremacy and loveliness of the Muses, and above all of the high vocation of the singer. It is not so much the hero in the renown that he spreads far and wide, that he honours in his poems. We are invited to listen to him, the poet. The honour is not to him in that he celebrates the victor, but rather to the victor that he is celebrated by Pindar. And it is this emphatic personal sense of greatness which constitutes the nobility of the lyric poet. Homer, as an individual person, is in his Epos so entirely sacrificed that people nowadays are loth to admit that he ever existed at all. His heroes live on for ever. Pindar's heroes are for us little better than empty names. He himself, however, the self-celebrated and self-honoured, remains before us immortal as the poet. The fame which his heroes claim is merely an appanage to that of the lyric singer. Even among the Romans the lyric poet to some extent aspires to such an independent position. Suetonius tells us, for instance, that Augustus wrote these works to Horace; _an vereris, ne apud posteros tibi infame sit, quod videaris familiaris nobis esse._ Horace, however, with the exception of those times, easily demonstrable, where he writes in an _ex officio_ manner of Augustus, betrays for the most part a precisely similar proud self-consciousness.
His fourteenth ode of the third book, for example, opens with a reference to the return of Augustus from Spain after his victory over the Cantabrians. But the poet goes on to celebrate the fact, that on account of the tranquillity, which the emperor has given the world, he himself as poet is able quietly to enjoy his easy-going leisure and his muse; he calls for garlands, unguents, and venerable wine to celebrate the occasion, and invites in all haste his mistress--in a word, he is simply preoccupied with the arrangements for his own banquet. We hear, however, at this time less of his love difficulties than in his youth, when Plaucus was consul, an occasion where he expressly says to the messenger he despatches: _Si per invisum mora janitorem_ _Fiet, abito_.
We may regard it as an even more honourable trait of Klopstock, that he