Vere. But this new, strange passion left him only the more a poet. In one of his fragments he wrote: "The poet worships every beautiful woman as the devout Catholic does every image of the Holy Virgin, but the image is not the Queen of Heaven."

The vacation had made him discontented with his position. All the rural charm seemed changed to commonplace. He now felt a bond of sympathy with Rousseau, Victor Hugo, and George Sand, sought literary uplift in Homer, Æschylus, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, and extended his reading to Gargantua, Tom Jones, Lamartine, Madame Bovary, and Vanity Fair, but declares he would willingly exchange Consuelo for Copperfield. It was at this time when Spielhagen was in unsteady mood as to his future, that he saw for the last time his old Greifswald friend, Albert Timm, who in the last three years had sadly changed from the promising student to the cynic: "'Yes,' he cried (from the platform of the moving train) 'I am going to America, not of my own wish, but because others wish it. They may be right; in any case, I have run my course in Europe. Perhaps I shall succeed better over there, or perhaps not; it's all the same. * * * Somewhere in the forest primeval! To the left around the corner! Don't forget: to the left around the ——' and the train sped out of sight." These parting words of his shipwrecked friend reminded Spielhagen only too keenly of his own unsettled career.

At length Spielhagen decided to go to Leipzig to prepare for a professorship of literature in the university. After a tour in Thuringia, during which he saw in Ilmenau a gipsy troop which furnished him with the character of Cziska in the Problematic Characters, he again took up his study of literature and esthetics. His encounter with Kant's philosophy and Schiller's esthetic theories led him back to Goethe and Spinoza. In the midst of these philosophical problems, he received one day a letter from Robert Hall Westley, an English friend in Leipzig, "a gentleman bred and born," telling him of a vacancy in English at the "Modernes Gesamt-Gymnasium" at that place. Spielhagen accepted the position in 1854, and in good American fashion followed the method of docendo discimus. Thus he finds himself again a producer.

The first fruit of his critical studies during the early Leipzig period was the completed essay On Humor, which was now accepted and published by Gutzkow in Unterhaltungen am häuslichen Herd. This, his first printed work, gave him new courage. His studies in English led him again to the English and American poets. The offer of a Leipzig firm to publish a collection of translations of American poetry added new zest to his reading in American literature. The chief source of his translations was Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America. A specimen from Emerson's Representative Men will illustrate his skill in translating:

Sphinx.

These translations appeared under the title Amerikanische Gedichte. In addition to selections from Bryant, Longfellow, Poe, Bayard Taylor, and others, he translated also George William Curtis' Nile Notes of an Howadji, which was published with the title Nil-Skizzen.

His admiration for American literature was very great, as his own words will show: "But upon this wide, entirely original, field of poetry what abundance, what variety of production! Palmettos grow by the side of gnarly oaks, and the most charming and modest flora of the prairie among the garden flowers of magic beauty and intoxicating perfume." The American poems were followed by translations of Michelet's L'Amour and other French and English works.

Spielhagen connected himself with Gutzkow's Europa and devoted himself for a time to criticism. Among the essays of this period are Objectivity in the Novel, Dickens, Thackeray, etc. At the suggestion of Kolatschek, an Austrian Forty-eighter, who had returned from America and founded the periodical Stimmung der Zeit in Vienna, Spielhagen wrote a severe criticism of Freytag's historical drama The Fabians. This attack upon Freytag was occasioned by the severe criticism of Gutzkow's Magician of Rome, published in the Grenzboten, edited by Julian Schmidt and Gustav Freytag. It was Spielhagen's demand for fair play as well as his admiration for Gutzkow that drew him into the conflict.

The old home in Pomerania had been broken up by the death of his father and the marriage of his sister, and the events of his early life could now be viewed as history. Out of these events and his later experience grew his first great novel, Problematic Characters (1860, Second Part 1861). This novel deals with the conditions in Pomerania in particular, and in Germany in general, before 1848. The title is drawn from Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose: "There are problematic characters which are not adapted to any position in life and are not satisfied with any condition in life. Out of this arises that titanic conflict which consumes life without compensation." The hero, Dr. Oswald Stein, is the poet himself in his rôle as family tutor and implacable foe of the institutions of the nobility, "a belated Young German" and an incipient socialist. He falls in love with Melitta von Berkow in her Hermitage, with the impulsive Emilie von Breesen at the ball, and with Helene von Grenwitz, his pupil. Because of the latter he fights a duel with her suitor, Felix, and then goes off with Dr. Braun to begin anew at Grünwald. In the second part of this novel this unfinished story is carried to its tragic and logical conclusion, when Oswald dies a heroic death at the barricades. Although most of the chief characters drawn in the novel are types, they are modeled after prototypes in real life. Oswald, the revolutionist with a suggestion of the Byronic, echoes the poet in his early career. Dr. Braun (Franz), the man of will, is modeled on the poet's young friend Bernhard, and Oldenburg, the titanic Faust nature, is taken from his friend Adalbert of the Gymnasium days at Stralsund. Albert Timm was his boon companion at Greifswald, and Professor Berger is a composite of Professor Barthold, the historian, and Professor M——, who later became insane.

In the years 1860-62 Spielhagen was editor of the literary supplement of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland, doing valuable service as a literary journalist. In this position he had opportunity to prepare himself for the wider activities as editor of the Deutsche Wochenschrift and later (1878-84) of Westermann's Monatshefte. After 1862 he was identified with the surging life of Berlin.

In The Hohensteins (1863) the story of a declining noble family, recalling the historical novel of Scott and Hauff's Lichtenstein, the socialistic program of Lassalle begins to appear. Lassalle's doctrines find their spokesman in the hero, Bernhard Münzer, the fantastic but despotic agitator and cosmopolitan socialist; while the idealist, Baltasar, voices the reform program of the poet himself in the words: "Educate yourselves, Germans, to love and freedom."

In the next novel, In Rank and File (1866), the program of Lassalle is reflected in Leo Gutmann, a character of the