INFLUENCE OF NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE 483 



from childhood, he discovered the fairest object of his poesy. In 

 the Mountain Forest, 1 finally, he became, more decisively than 

 Wilibald Alexis or Charles Sealsfield, the real founder of provincial 

 romance in Germany. 



As an historic narration from the days of the Thirty Years' War, 

 the Mountain Forest is in line with the Walter Scott tradition; 

 but the historical matter is sketched only in a slight and almost 

 shadowy way. Real historical studies were scarcely made by the 

 author; the truth was rather that the legends of his native region 

 afforded him the stimulus. The whole action is suitable to the present 

 day, or else to a land of fable. Legends and parables are inserted; 

 the legendary tone is preserved throughout. The women arc pictured 

 as fairy forms; the hero, a natural son of Gustavus Adolphus, seems 

 a legendary prince; in eternal youth and beauty the form of the dead 

 floats before the eyes of his loved one. Like a legend, too, is the end 

 of it all ; the survivors grow preternaturally old. No one ever learned 

 of their death. 



The story is attached to a ruin near Stifter's home, which the people 

 called a haunted castle. In the story it is peopled and alive, a home 

 full of a noble civilization and high culture. But the wood to the 

 west of it he describes as the virgin forest untouched by civilization, 

 the action of the story being for it merely a rapidly passing episode. 

 On the shore of the lake, where the characters of the story built 

 a blockhouse, the seed of the forest is sown again, and every trace 

 of human footsteps disappears. 



With great artistic power the author brings the fortunes of his 

 characters, the weal or woe of their loves, into intimate relation with 

 the course of nature, the cycles of day and year, the life of the forest. 

 He pictures the dark and gloomy aspect of the forest, the sublime 

 loneliness of its measureless extent, the stillness, the silence of it, and 

 then, too, the tones that enliven it; he shows it in its splendid sum- 

 mer attire, and in the icy garb of winter; all its colors, tints, and 

 shades he seeks to reproduce. He makes the wood a thing of life, with 

 a soul, he illuminates it with love and goodness, he regards it us 

 the most magnificent of the Creators works, as a church, a temple, 

 a cathedral. The forest makes one good and reverent, innocent and 

 childlike, it assures outward and inward peace. A glorification of the 

 forest, a hymn to its beauty and power, which are like 1 those of 

 paradise. 



\Vilh such a child of heath and wood, who in one of his first letters 

 describes a stroll through the primeval forest, and pictures the 

 spectacle of the wood flaming by night in the storm, as he himself had 

 experienced it, where is there opportunity for any foreign stimulus ? 

 Yet it is present. In his descriptions of nature he is a pupil of Jean 



1 IIwJucaM. 



