is closely akin to religion; there is an infinite charm in his
description of the mysterious life of apparently lifeless objects; he
renders all the sensuous impressions so masterfully that the reader
often has the feeling of a physical experience; and it is but natural
that up to his thirty-fifth year, before he discovered his literary
talent, he had dreamed of being a landscape painter. Hebbel's epigram,
"Know ye why ye are such past masters in painting beetles and
buttercups? 'Tis because ye know not man; 'tis because ye see not the
stars," utterly fails to do justice to Stifter's poetic individuality.
But in avoiding the great tempests and serious conflicts of the human
heart he obeyed a healthy instinct of his artistic genius, choosing to
retain undisputed mastery in his own field.

It is, of course, an impossibility to treat adequately, in the remainder
of the space at our disposal, the poetic and general literary merit of
Fritz Reuter (1810-1874), the great regenerator and rejuvenator of Low
German as a literary language. His lasting merit in the field of the
village story is that by his exclusive use of dialect he threw an
effective safeguard around the naturalness of the emotional life of his
characters, and through this ingenious device will for all time to come
serve as a model to writers in this particular domain. For dialectic
utterance does not admit of any super-exaltation of sentiment; at any
rate, it helps to detect such at first glance. But there are other
features no less meritorious in his stories of rural life, chief of
which is that unique blending of seriousness and humor that makes us
laugh and cry at the same time. With his wise and kind heart, with his
deep sympathy for all human suffering, with the smile of understanding
for everything truly human, also for all the limitations and follies of
human nature, Reuter has worthily taken his place by the side of his
model, Charles Dickens. It is questionable whether even Dickens ever