CHAMISSO AS NATURALIST AND PHILOLOGIST. 
By Prof. George F. McKibben. 
Upon Monbijou Square in Berlin there was erected in August 
last a statue to the poet Chamisso. The longest life-time has passed 
since his story, Peter Schlemihl, appeared, — a story written for chil- 
dren, which soon made its author known among civilized nations the 
world over. Tom Moore’s Irish Melodies were in their day no more 
popular in English-speaking lands than were Chamisso’s poems in Ger- 
many. Though not given to boasting, he could say in a letter written 
about 1830, ‘‘The people are singing my songs ; they are sung in parlors; 
boys declaim them in the schools.” This popularity is not yet wholly 
past ; his poems have still a steady though not a large sale among 
Germans, having the especial distinction of being a very common gift- 
book for weddings and christenings. For Chamisso is beyond all 
question the German poet who has most acceptably sung of marriage 
and home-life. In Robert Schumann’s musical setting of Chamisso’s 
Fraiienliebe und Leben, a group of lyrics unequalled by any who have 
sung of wedded love, we have that rare combination, music “married 
to immortal verse,” in which each part enhances the beauty and power 
of the other. 
His place in the literature of Germany has long been conceded ; 
his poems alone entitle him to so much of fame. But in that which 
Germans call the “world-literature” he must also be accorded a place. 
His Peter Schlemihl bears translation, that searching test which tries 
the worth or worthlessness of a book. Who can read the story, per- 
haps in the English with Cruikshank’s illustrations, without wonder at 
its ingenuity, deep and sensitive feeling, and sad but wise spirit ? The 
reader probably wonders at another thing ; that the hero, though isolat- 
ed from his kind by his shadowless condition, yet, unembittered by 
his lost happiness, finds consolation in his power of roaming over the 
earth, “measuring now its hights, now the temperature of its springs, 
now that of the air ; observing animals, examining plants ; hastening 
