make-up as literary influence, it must have emanated from the sage of
Burgdorf and Yverdun. To some extent also Johann Peter Hebel
(1760-1826), justly famed for his Alemannian dialect poems, may have
served him as a model, for Hebel followed an avowedly educational
purpose in the popular tales of his _Schatzkästlein des rheinischen
Hausfreunds_ ("Treasure Box of the Rhenish Crony"), of which it has been
said that they outweigh tons of novels.

Gotthelf's intention was twofold: to champion the cause of the rustic
yeomanry in the threatening of its peculiar existence--for the radical
spirit of the times was already seizing and preying upon the hallowed
customs of the peasantry's life--and to fight against certain inveterate
vices of the rural population itself that seemed to be indigenous to the
soil. As the first great social writer of the German tongue, he is not
content to make the rich answerable for existing conditions, but labors
with all earnestness to educate the lower classes toward self-help. At
first he appeared as an uncommonly energetic, conservative, polemic
author in whose views the religious, basis of life and genuine moral
worth coincided with the traditional character of the country yeomanry.
A more thorough examination revealed to his readers an original epic
talent of stupendous powers. He was indeed eminently fitted to be an
educator and reformer among his flock by his own nobility of character,
his keen knowledge and sane judgment of the people's real needs and
wants, his warm feeling, and his unexcelled insight into the peasant's
inner life. Beyond that, however, he was gifted with exuberant poetic
imagination and creative power, with an intuitive knowledge of the
subtlest workings of the emotional life, and a veritable genius for
finding the critical moments in an individual existence.

So it came about that the poet triumphed over the social reformer, in