NOTICE OF C. T. BROOKS. 79 



self over without reserve to his author, a sort of literary 

 self-renunciation, self-surrender, which is to my mind the 

 sine qua non, the beginning and end of successful effort to 

 fairly interpret and render in good faith the spirit of an- 

 other's work. 



He had also the drollery, the love of the grotesque, the 

 quiet, humorous enjoyment of the extravagant vagaries of 

 German wit, of that sly fun that so pervades home life 

 and street life in Germany, which made it easy for him to 

 transfer that peculiar atmosphere to his American reprint. 

 His "Max and Maurice," for instance, is, of its kind, in- 

 imitable. No one is too old, no one is too young, to laugh 

 over it. But he was equally fortunate in his more serious 

 efforts in German translation. I will not enumerate these 

 works nor characterize them. The death of Freiligrath, 

 the great revolutionary, democratic, people's poet of 

 modern Germany, the Burns, the Whittier, of the Teu- 

 ton race, occurred while I was at Stuttgart, where he had 

 been residing, and when the first anniversary of it came 

 about, I was still at Stuttgart. In Southern Germany the 

 custom is to celebrate the day of the death rather than of 

 the birth of those to whom the world owes something, and 

 this first anniversary of Freiligrath's death was noticed by 

 the English and American residents of Stuttgart with me- 

 morial exercises in which many Germans, who understood 

 English, united with the English-speaking admirers of the 

 poet. He had lived much in England, had purposed em- 

 igrating to America whither he had already sent forward 

 a pioneer in the person of his son, and was well acquainted 

 with Longfellow (whom he had translated,) and with Mr. 

 Brooks, and was read and admired by Whittier. I was 

 asked to make the address on the occasion, and in that 

 connection took some pains to seek out the best English 

 translations of some of Freiligrath's characteristic poems. 



