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FOREIGN

MONTHLY

REVIEW.

THE LYRIC POETS OF GERMANY.

Deutscher Musenalmanach für das Jahr 1839.- (German Almanac of the Muses, for 1839.)

THE series of the Annual bearing the title of "Musenalmanach" possesses a peculiar interest, as being the most pleasing, and, at the same time, the most immediate index of the actual living, growing state of German poetry, especially in the lyric department. This Annual is supported by the first writers of the period, and the collected volumes of poems that appear from year to year are, for the most part, regathered by their authors from this periodical, in which they are first introduced to the notice of the public. They thus stand as a continual record of the state of poetry, and are useful for the double purpose of exhibiting the progress (or, perhaps, alas! the decline) of some old favourite, while, at the same time, they afford a happy medium for bringing into notice the fresh, warm effusions of some young aspirant, who otherwise might remain in obscurity.

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The "Deutscher Musenalmanach" was for many years edited by Gustav Schwab and Adelbert von Chamisso, the latter the author of Peter Schlemihl," a work long known in this country. Time, however, has wrought strange changes with the last volume. Gustav Schwab has retired from the editorship, and left his place to Franz Baron Gaudy; and though the name of Chamisso still appears on the title-page, it stands but as a melancholy remembrance, for that excellent poet departed this life last year, prior to the publication of the Annual which bears his name as Editor.

Chamisso was a true German author: he had that predilection for ballads which has never declined since the days of Bürger; no one can tell a story in verse better than Chamisso; he cared not for its being old, or even hackneyed; he could always give it interest, and that not by any ornament for nobody writes with more simplicity than Chamisso-but by the naïveté with which he tells it, and the art (if art it be) with which he brings out the points, and displays his own feeling of his subject. Not that his VOL. I.—NO, I.—MAY, 1839.

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