PREFACE. A complete History of German Poetry is hardly within reach of my local command of library: so comprehensive an undertaking would require another residence in a country, from which I have now been separated more than forty years; and my age, my habits, my income, render it inconvenient for me to revisit Germany. Still, having long been in the practice of importing the productions of its fine literature, having metrically translated various characteristic specimens of it, having abridged many lives of the poets for one periodic publication of this country, (Monthly Magazine) and criticized for another, (Monthly Review) many of the classical works of art, I have thought fit here to assemble, in systematic order, these scattered and successive contributions to an "Historic Survey of German Poetry." Introductory and connective sections have been composed, deficiencies filled up, and superfluities retrenched; so that, |