The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Volume V Part 9

Here, too, he heard the rustling of the forest leaves and the splashing of the fountain; here he was grounded in the strong and pious, if somewhat narrow, Catholicism of his race. It was a Catholicism, however, which was genuinely Romantic in that it sought comfort in sorrow directly from nature, a tendency which gives rise to some of the best and most heartfelt religious poetry in German literature. A fine example of this is to be found in Eichendorff's beautiful poems on the death of his child. It is interesting to see how, in this spiritual poetry, there is a constant melting of nature into religion, a dissolving of the Romantic atmosphere, of that youthful fervor which Eichendorff never really outgrew but continued to draw upon for inspiration for all his later work, into a broad, deep, manly piety.

Eichendorff's poetry began with Tieckian notes; it was influenced by Brentano, and, unfortunately, was colored by the productions of Count Otto von Loben (1786-1825), a pseudo-Romanticist of less than mediocre ability. But Eichendorff's individuality, with its constant accentuation of the acoustic, soon made itself felt and brought into German poetry what Tieck had tried for and failed in--an effect of perfect musical synthesis. The melody of the verse receives a peculiar lilt by frequent changes in metre between stanzas or in the midst of the stanza, and is thus saved from monotony. Were its metrical harmony tiring in any way, it could not have been set to music with such surprising success. As it is, Eichendorff's poetry has become a permanent part of the musical life of the nation. _The Broken Ring_ has pa.s.sed into a folk-song, and _"O valleys wide!"_ with Mendelssohn's music is a popular choral of deep religious import.

Yet Eichendorff does not attract either by the variety of his themes or of his rhymes. It is his very repet.i.tions which so endear him to the popular heart. His is not pa.s.sionate poetry, nor does it subjectively portray the soul-life of its author. In fact, it is saved from monotony of content at times only by its extreme honesty and its lovable simplicity. There is none of Goethe's power of suggesting landscape in a few touches, none of Goethe's logic of description, none of Goethe's clear inner objectivity, but a certain haze lies over Eichendorff's landscapes--the haze of a lyric Corot; at the same time, this landscape has the power of suggestion to the German mind. Paul Heyse, himself a poet, makes one of his characters say, "I have always carried Eichendorff Is book of songs with me on my travels. Whenever a feeling of strangeness comes over me in the variegated days, or I feel a longing for home, I turn its leaves and am at home again. None of our poets has the same magic reminiscence of home which captures our hearts with such touching monotony, with so few pictures and notes.

* * * He is always new, as the voices of Nature itself, and never oppresses, but rather lulls one to sweet dreams as if a mother were singing her child to sleep."

The one novel of Eichendorff which has lived, _From the Life of a Good-for-nothing_ (1826), is a last Romantic shoot of Friedrich Schlegel's doctrine of divine laziness--a delightful story, abounding in those elements which perennially endear Romanticism to the young heart, for it is full of nature and love and fortunate happenings.

What could be more charming than the spirit in which the hero throws away the vegetables in his garden and puts in flowers? What more nave than his spyings, his fiddlings? The strength of the story lies in the fact that while its head is in the clouds, its feet are on the ground.

There is no sentimentalizing, no breaking down of cla.s.s distinctions; the good-for-nothing marries his lady-love, but she is of his own rank. The pseudo-Romanticism of modern novels is avoided; the hero neither wins a kingdom nor is he the long-lost heir of some potentate--he remains just what he was, a lovable good-for-nothing.

The weather-eye on probability is what in later times has helped the Romanticists to slip so easily into Realism--and to reactionary views.

Of all the great ma.s.s of material left by Friedrich de la Motte Fouque (1777-1843), only a lyric or two and the fairy tale _Undine_ have any value for the present day. Fouque represents the talent which develops in the glare of the world, is popular for a decade, but soon withers when the sun is set. His relations to Romanticism are largely external; he frequented the salons of Rachel Levin and Henrietta Herz in Berlin, was aided by August von Schlegel, and was praised by Jean Paul; but in his heart he was not inspired by any of the deeper longings that characterize the true Romantic spirit. Even though he is to be credited with the first modern dramatization of the Nibelungen story, _The Hero of the North_ (1810), and though he took subjects from the Germanic past and from the chivalric days, he brought no new life to his rehabilitations. Fouque was too productive, too facile, too external, too indifferent to psychological motivation to be real.

He diluted Romanticism and sentimentalized it. In him patriotism becomes chauvinism; love, philandering; and his age of chivalry, a thinly veiled and sentimental picture of his own times. The strength and the indigenousness of Arnim are gone, and that power to throw a Romantic glamor over life which Tieck and Hoffmann had, is lacking.

Only in his charming fairy-tale, _Undine_ (1811), does Fouque rise above his _milieu. Undine_, the source of which, according to Fouque himself, is to be found in a work of Paracelsus on supernatural beings, remains one of the best creations of the Romantic school and, like Eichendorff's novel, has become international, not only in its original form but in the opera by Lortzing (first performance, Hamburg, 1845). The value of the story lies in the author's power to make the reader believe in Undine, the water sprite, and in the presentation of a new nature-mythology. All Romanticists have consciously or unconsciously attempted to satisfy Friedrich Schlegel's demand for anew mythology: Fouque's earth, air, and water spirits people the elements with graceful forms from the world of nature; the nymph Undine in the form of a flowing stream embraces even in death the grave of her lover.

Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862) was not fundamentally a Romantic personality. He is called "the cla.s.sicist of Romanticism," and with justice. The term shows that he is felt to have something of completion, of inner perfection, of harmony of form and content which was lacking in the truer Romanticists. Uhland was without their early cosmopolitanism. Political life as manifested in him was, first of all, Suabian--for Uhland was a Suabian and most intimately a.s.sociated with that section of Germany. He was actively and practically interested in the politics of his native land as a member of its legislative bodies and as delegate to the national parliament at Frankfurt in 1848. Uhland had a conservative love for the "good old Suabian law." He felt the doubtful position of the South German states in the struggle against Napoleon, and it was only when Wurtemberg took its stand with the allies in the final conflict that the embarra.s.sment of his position was relieved, and Uhland's patriotic verse a.s.sumed its full tone. But his poetry never became a spur to national achievement like the verse of Arndt, that other German poet-professor. As a member of the national parliament, Uhland was opposed to the exclusion of Austria from the hegemony, and to the two-chamber system of legislation. But Uhland's conservatism is unalterably honest without any reactionary traits; he resigned his professorship rather than be hindered in his political activities, and refused, with the peasant's dourness, all the orders and distinctions that were offered him.

Indeed, there is something of the peasant nature in all of Uhland's verse. St.u.r.dy reserve characterizes it--that reserve which forbids the peasant to show his feelings under the stress of the greatest emotion.

Uhland does not carry his feelings to market; like Schiller, he is not a love poet. There is no display, no self-a.n.a.lysis, no self-exaltation, no amalgamation of self with nature. Uhland as a poet is not interested in his own psychology, but in the impinging world and in the tender past. When Goethe said that Uhland was primarily a balladist, he was right, for the ballad presupposes just that permeation of the object by the emotion that satisfies the unquestionable lyric gift possessed by Uhland, without in any way destroying the essentially narrative objectivity of his style.

Uhland's greatest fame rests, then, on his ballads. The difference between these and those of Goethe and Schiller is not merely in the so-called "castle-Romanticism" of Uhland, not in a lingering sentimentality in some of the poorer ones, but in Uhland's ability at will to catch the folk-tone. Sometimes this folk-tone is a question of certain technical tricks, such as the abrupt shift of scene, repet.i.tion, varying series of scenes or words, archaized language; but it is just as often in the mood which Uhland throws over the whole. He thus can catch the inner form and essential mood of the popular ballad in a way that not even Goethe does in his _Erlking_. Uhland's ballads and romances vary greatly in quality; none, perhaps, has the grandiose dramatic and ethical note of Schiller's _The Cranes of Ibycus_ and none the power of revealing the hidden forces of nature in anthropomorphic and demoniac form as Goethe does in his _Erlking_ and _The Fisher_. But Uhland's poems are more varied in treatment, even though he cannot be said to have brought any new forms and themes into German verse. There is much talk of poets and poetry in his verse and much of the tender melancholy of parting lovers, of separation and death. There are also some very healthy bacchic notes. Often the ballads are a mere presentation of a scene, with neither plot nor moral; once in a while, too, Uhland shows a humorous touch. But various as are his themes and treatments, the treatment is always nicely adapted to the theme.

It is difficult to imagine a better suiting of form and content than in _The Singer's Curse_. The management of the vowel sequences is truly wonderful and the rhymes carry the emotional words with a fine virtuosity. _The Luck of Edenhall_, a variation of a Scottish theme and also of the Biblical "_Mene tekel_," displays without sermonizing the greatest ethical vigor. It has far more dramatic energy than either Byron's or Heine's "Belshazzar" poems, with fully as much dismal foreboding. _Taillefer_, which has been called "the sparkling queen" of Uhland's ballads, has fresh vigor but lacks the power of handling the moral forces of the universe with as much dramatic vividness. It has a nave joy of life not elsewhere found in Uhland's ballads.

Uhland was the greatest poet of the "Suabian School," a group of young men who objected to being denominated a school. Among them was William Hauff (1802-27), who is known for several lyrics, a number of excellent short stories, and a historical novel, _Lichtenstein_ (1826), in the manner of Scott. His _Trooper's Song_ is a variation of an old theme and is of great metrical interest in that here, as in Uhland, one may observe how the subtle handling of rhythm, the lengthening or shortening of a line, or the shift of stress, brings with it a corresponding shift of emotion. _Lichtenstein_ is the story of the struggle of Ulrich of Wurtemberg against the Suabian League and gives us a Romantic picture of the Duke which is not justified by the facts. It was, however, an attempt to vitalize history and owes its origin to the Romantic longing for fatherland. Its immediate impulse among Scott's novels was _Quentin Durward_ and, like _Quentin Durward_, it has a double plot--the sentimental young lovers and the romantic ruler. It also shows all the pageantry of Romanticism and the nave technique of the beginning of an art-form in the early stages of a new literary movement.

Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866) was prevented from taking part in the Wars of Liberation by poor health, but added his _Sonnets in Harness_ to the poetry of the period. These sonnets had no such stirring effect as the poems of Korner, not only because of their literary form, but because, in spite of their unquestioned belligerency, they had not the tone of religious conviction against the enemy which characterized the verses of Arndt and the rest. Other poems, like _Korner's Spirit_, show how deeply Ruckert felt himself in sympathy with his times; his reward has been to have added a very large number of poems to the every-day repertory of Germany. His _Barbarossa_ is found in almost every reading book.

The cycle _Love's Spring_ is an imperishable monument to his love for Louisa Wiethaus. But too many of the poems are dedicated to her and too many inconsequential moods relating to her are recorded. In spite of this, Ruckert has resolved the discord between every-day life and poetry with the simplest poetic apparatus. Ruckert has also enriched the German language with a ma.s.s of gnomic poetry, to the writing of which he was led by his Oriental studies. This gnomic poetry (_The Wisdom of the Brahman_) has been aptly said to recall at times the ripeness of the mature Goethe and at other times--Polonius. Ruckert was one of the first to introduce the Orient and its verse-forms into German literature. Here the influence of Friedrich Schlegel is unmistakable. He was also a master in the reproduction of the complicated metres of the East and South. Though many of these verse-forms have refused to become indigenous in Germany, a large number of new words invented by Ruckert have had poetical vogue, and even where the new formations were too bold or too _recherche_, they accustomed German ears to a new idea-presentation through sound.

Ruckert, like the average Romanticist, lacked moderation in his production, and was utterly without critical faculty in respect to his own verse. Much that he has written has perished, but some of his work--both original and translation--is a permanent part of the best of German lyric verse.

More individual than Ruckert is Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838).

Though he was born in the Champagne in France, and was therefore a fellow-countryman of Joinville and La Fontaine, he became a German by education and preference, and his name is inseparably linked with German scholarship and letters. It is remarkable that Chamis...o...b..gan to write German only after 1801 and is reported never to have spoken it perfectly; yet his verse ranks with the best products of Germany in fluency and in form. Much of it, especially that with woman's love as its theme, is extremely German in thought and feeling, though perhaps French in its keenness of a.n.a.lysis. So German is Chamisso felt to be that at his best he is ranked with Goethe and Heine.

When the boy Chamisso was nine years old, the family was driven from France but was later allowed to return, though Adalbert never went back permanently. Thus it was that during the years 1806-13, the young expatriate led a life of the greatest mental torment; France no longer meant anything to him, and in Germany he felt himself a stranger and an outcast. Always awkward personally, and of a nervous temperament, he found it difficult to adjust himself to surrounding conditions.

His scholarly zeal, however, and his ability to sit for hours in close study, show how completely his mentality was adjustable to the German manner. In Berlin he was accepted by the younger Romantic group and was a member of the famous North Star Club with Arnim and his set. In 1815-18 he made a trip around the world, and in later years devoted himself especially to the study of botany.

Only the poetry of Chamisso's later period is of supreme consequence.

As a man in the fifties, he wrote some of his most beautiful verse.

He was a nave poet, but a poet of many moods. His love poetry is the poetry of longing, and ranks with that of Brentano in its ability to suggest states of feeling. Among his best poems are his verse-tales, such as _The Women of Weinsberg_, where his narrative genius ranks with that of his fellow-countryman, La Fontaine. Especially good are his poems in terzines. These mark the real introduction of this metre into Germany. The best of these, _Salas y Gomez_, has the additional advantage of real experience, for the material observation at the basis of it is derived from his tour of circ.u.mnavigation. His poems in this metre are often genre poems, pure prose in part, but frequently of a drastic humor that ranks with that of the best of the old French fabliaux. His realism is, however, never common, and, in such poems as _The Old Washerwoman_, to quote Goethe's _Ta.s.so_, "he often enn.o.bles what seems vulgar to us."

Chamisso is Romantic in his interest in translations, in early reminiscences of Uhland's "castle-Romanticism," and in his poetry of indefinite longing, but his admiration for Napoleon and his tendency toward realism point the way which all Romanticism naturally took--the way leading through Heine to Young Germany on the one hand and through Tieck's novelettes to realistic prose on the other.

As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a work which has become international in popularity, _Peter Schlemihl_ (1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose. The tale of the man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of Fortunatus has become in Chamisso's hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale in key-note and style. At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word variously interpreted as "Lover of G.o.d," or as "awkward fellow." If it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that medieval Faust who also made a compact with the devil; if the latter, one who breaks his finger when sticking it into a custard pie; then Schlemihl is Chamisso himself, "that dean of Schlemihls," feeling himself at a loss in any environment. He may be the man without a country, he may be the man who draws attention to himself by selling what seems of little value to him, but which afterward proves indispensable for the right conduct of life. The story in this way brings forward a bit of popular ethics, or, rather, it examines an ethical note from the popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. _Schlemihl_ is genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to its climax. It does not make mood--it has mood.

The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are the products of Romantic scholarship; they represent the highest type of scholarly attainment and of scholarly personality. They are always thought of together, for they shared all possessions alike and were not drawn apart by the fact that William married and Jacob remained a bachelor. Their fidelity to each other is touching, and no more lovable story is told than that of Jacob's breaking down in a lecture and crying, "My brother is so sick!"

Jacob (1785-1863) was the philologist, the inductive gatherer of scientific material, the close logical deducer of facts. He "presented Germany with its mythology, with its history of legal antiquities, with its grammar and its history of language." He is the author of Grimm's law of consonant permutation which laid the foundations of modern philological science and is the founder of philological science in general.

Wilhelm (1786-1859), no less exact a scientist, was more a Romantic nature, with a greater power of synthesis under poetic stress. The two brothers began their collecting activities under the influence of Arnim, and their work with folk-tales in prose corresponds to _The Boy's Magic Horn_ in verse. It was Wilhelm who gave Grimms' _Fairy Tales_ their artistic form. He remolded, joined, separated--in fact, wrought the crude materials into such shape that this work has penetrated into every land and has become a household word for young and old. The various early editions show the progress in the method of Wilhelm. The first edition (1812) reproduces more exactly what the brothers heard; the later ones show that Wilhelm consciously attempted to give artistic form to the tales. That his method was justified the history of the stories proves; they are not only material for ethnological study, but are dear to all hearts. The stories have the genuine folk-tone; they are true products of the folk-imagination, with all the logic of that imagination. All phases of life are touched and the interest never flags. The spirit of nature has been kept.

The Romanticists were not successful in the drama. Kleist, the greatest dramatist of the period, was not primarily a Romantic poet. The Schlegels wrote frosty plays and Tieck attempted dramatic production. It was left for the most bizarre of the Romantic group to write the play of greatest power in it and to set a dramatic fashion which for more than a decade carried all before it.

Zacharias Werner (1768-1823), after a life of wild sensual excesses, finally found refuge in the Roman Church and as a popular and sensational preacher aroused Vienna with drastic sermons and clownish antics. Of his various plays, _The Sons of the Valley_ (1803) and the _Cross on the Baltic_ (1806) deserve mention for their religious and mystic subject-matter, for which Werner himself has attempted an explanation, though without adding to their understanding. _Martin Luther, or the Consecration of Power_ (1807) is a pageant play of great interest. Its recantation, _The Power of Weakness_, was written after Werner's conversion. More important than these is his so-called "fate tragedy," _The 24th of February_ (1810 per formed in Weimar; published 1815). This day was a day of terror to Werner, for on it he lost in the same year his mother and his most intimate friend. He therefore in the play invests the day with a fatal significance, and on it a malignant fate has especial power over the fortunes of the persons of the drama; there is also a fatal requisite and a general atmosphere of fatalism. The play started a whole series; some of these were crude and weak imitations, others, like Grillparzer's _The Ancestress_, were of great power. These plays were conditioned by something in the air. Perhaps Napoleon, the man of fate, ruling the minds and destinies of a whole continent, had something to do with the philosophical background. Werner caught the fatalistic spirit, gave it concise and logical form, and succeeded in producing a play which has both atmosphere and logic of development. In all of these plays, in so far as they are good, the effect is produced by the recognition scenes which hold the reader rapt to the end. But the weak and vulgar imitations of the category outnumbered the powerful plays in the _genre_, and the well-merited death-blow was given them by Platen's _The Fateful Fork_ (1826).

E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) was a thoroughly Romantic person. Like his fellow-Konigsberger, Werner, he went through a period of wildest dissipation, and all his life was easily influenced by alcohol. He was a painter, a writer, and a musician. His ability in the pictorial arts was mainly in caricature and his career as a composer is typically Romantic; though he never but once completed a composition, that he started, he was thoroughly at home in the theory of the art. Like all Romanticists, Hoffmann was interested in and tried all phases of life and refused to recognize the boundaries between the various parts of existence, between the arts, and between reality and unreality.

Hoffmann, with all his North German power of reasoning and his zeal and conscientiousness in public office, was emphatically _that_ Romanticist a.s.sociated with the night-sides of literature and life.

There is something uncanny both in the man and his writings. His power of putting the scene of his most unreal stories in the midst of well-known places, his ability to shift the reader from the real to the unreal and _vice versa_, make some of his stories seem like phantasmagorias.

In all of Hoffmann's stories there is some unpleasant, bizarre character; this is the author's satire on his own strange personality.

There is none of Poe's objectivity in Hoffmann, but he uses his subjectivity in a peculiarly Romantic fashion. It is his idea to raise the reader above the every-day point of view, to flee from this to a magic world where the unusual shall take the place of the real and where wonder shall rule. So there are in Hoffmann's stories a series of characters who are really doubles. To the uninitiated they seem every-day creatures; to those who know, they are fairies or beings from the supernatural world. Such characters are found at their best in _The Golden Pot_.

Hoffmann has influenced both French and English literatures more than any other Romantic poet. Hawthorne and Poe read him, and he was felt by the French to be one of the first Germans whom they understood. It was not merely that his clear reason appealed to the French, but that they saw in him one endowed as with a sixth sense. He has a fineness of observation, especially for the ridiculous sides of humanity, together with a tenderness of spirit, that was new in German literature as such men as Sainte-Beuve and Gautier saw it. The soul at war with itself, uncovering its most secret thoughts, the _"malheur d'etre poete,"_ coupled with wit, taste, gaiety, and the comedy spirit--all these the French found in Hoffmann as in no other German.

Poe was also influenced by Hoffmann, but Poe's whole world is the supernatural, and where Hoffmann slips with fantastic but logical changes from the real to the unreal, Poe's metempsychosis is the real in his world and he has a deeper insight into the world of terror. The difference between Hawthorne and Hoffmann is even more striking, for in the American the supernatural is the embodiment of the Puritan New England conscience. In Hoffmann there is no such elevation of the moral world to the rank of an atmosphere.

In Hoffmann there is no out-of-doors, no lyric love; some of his characters are frankly insane. The musical takes on a supreme significance among the sensations, and music seemed the only art which was able to draw the soul of the man from his earth-bound habitation.

Only in music did Hoffmann find the ability to make the Romantic escape from the homelessness of this existence to the all-embracing world of the unreal. But too often in his works does the unreal fail to satisfy the reader. There is an effort felt, an effect sought for, and, while the amalgamation of the two worlds is perfect, the world to which Hoffmann is able to take us proves to be without the cogency which our imaginations expect. Here Hoffmann fails. His world of the imagination cannot always be taken seriously.

Count August von Platen-Hallermund (1796-1835) is characterized by the eternal Romantic homelessness; at every turn of his career this impresses one. Of ancient n.o.ble Franconian stock, he felt himself a foreigner in Bavaria which had acquired Franconia in the Napoleonic period. In his early life in the military academy at Munich he was never thoroughly at home, for his was not a military spirit and he was unable to follow his literary tastes. When finally he was enabled to study at Wurzburg and Erlangen, even the friendship of Sch.e.l.ling could not compensate for the late beginning of a university career which was filled with the study of modern European and Oriental languages but which had the bitterest personal disappointments. Even in Italy, the land of every German poet's dreams, Platen never felt himself at home, and the pictures of him from his Italian life are of a tragic, lonesome figure. The discord between body and soul, that homelessness in one's own physical body which characterized Hoffmann and made him seem diabolical to so many, is also to be noted in Platen. Carried over to the moral world, it accounts for his ardent cultivation of friendship rather than love, and frees him from the bitter accusations of Heine, whose attack in _The Baths of Lucca_ is one of the most scurrilous and venomous pasquils in all literary history. Finally, in the esthetic world, Platen seems largely un-German. His esthetics were of the Cla.s.sical and Renaissance times; in an age of the breaking down of conventions and of literary revolutions, Platen held himself rigidly aristocratic; he clung to a canon of beauty in an age which was giving birth to realism.

Platen's poetry falls into two periods--the early German tentative period and the later or foreign period, the poems of which were mostly written in Italy and in imitation of, or adapted from, foreign metres.

Platen is always represented as a master of form, and, since Jacob Grimm's characterization of him, has been accused of "marble coldness." That Platen handled difficult metres with virtuosity is not to be laid against him; it is to the advantage of German verse that such poems as his _ghasels_ made indigenous, in part, the feeling for mere beauty in verse. German poets have too often gone the road of mere formlessness. Platen cultivated style, polished and revised his lines with as great care as did his arch-enemy Heine, and it is only a confession of lack of ear to refuse him the name of poet. No one who reads his Polish Songs can help feeling that they are the products of fire and inspiration.

It must be confessed, however, that there is in Platen a remarkable lack of inner experience. He went through life without ever having been shaken to the depths of his nature and was, unfortunately, not of so Olympian a calmness that, like Goethe, he could present the world in plastic repose and sublimity. With all his refinement and fervor he has left but few poems of lasting interest, and of these _The Grave in the Busento_ is perhaps the best.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MAGIC HORN]

_LUDWIG ACHIM VON ARNIM AND CLEMENS BRENTANO_

THE BOY'S MAGIC HORN[7] (1806)

WERE I A LITTLE BIRD

Were I a little bird, And had two little wings, I'd fly to thee; But I must stay, because That cannot be.

Though I be far from thee, In sleep I dwell with thee, Thy voice I hear.

But when I wake again, Then all is drear.

Each nightly hour my heart With thoughts of thee will start When I'm alone; For thou 'st a thousand times Pledged me thine own.