Most of the songs of
this period have been already translated. Ruckert, in a series of
verses which he called "Sonnets in Armor," gave a fine scholarly
expression to the popular desires. Here is his exultation over the
Battle of Leipsic:--
Can there no song
Roar with a might
Loud as the fight
Leipsic's region along?
Three days and three nights,
No moment of rest,
And not for a jest,
Went thundering the fights.
Three days and three nights
Leipsic Fair kept: Frenchmen who pleasured
There with an iron yardstick were measured,
Bringing the reckoning with them to rights.
Three days and all night
A battue of larks the Leipsicker make;
Every haul a hundred he takes,
A thousand each flight.
Ha! it is good,
Now that the Russian can boast no longer
He alone of us is stronger
To slake his steppes with hostile blood.
Not in the frosty North alone,
But here in Meissen,
Here at Leipsic on the Pleissen,
Can the French be overthrown.
Shallow Pleissen deep is flowing;
Plains upheaving,
The dead receiving,
Seem to mountains for us growing.
They will be our mountains never,
But this fame
Shall be our claim
On the rolls of earth forever.
What all this amounted to, when the German people began to send in
their constitutional _cartes-blanches_, is nicely taken off by
Hoffman von Fallersleben, in this mock war-song, published in 1842:--
_All sing_.
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