HERDER’S greatest work was in making Goethe possible. Germany of the eighteenth century despised its own simplicity, and stood shamed before the pseudo-classicism of the decadent French monarchy. Herder taught German youth to look for the highest literary excellence, not in triolets and rondeaus, or even in tragedies written in lilting twelve-syllabled iambics supposed to represent the Athenian masters, but in the treasured ballads and songs of the common people, in Shakespeare, in Homer, in the Psalms of David, and in the book of Job. He taught Germany to understand the merits of the Scotch heroic ballads, which are the finest in the literature of Europe and are so nearly German that when “Bonny George Campbell” was translated into German, Longfellow mistook it for a German “lied” and retranslated it into admirable English verse—not very far removed from the original Scotch. By cultivating the taste for the strong and natural simplicities of primitive literature, Herder educated the generation of German singers who, with Goethe and Schiller at their head, taught Longfellow to avoid the stiffness of the English “classical” school. So great was Herder’s activity and so wide its range, that at his death, December 18th, 1803, he left material which, when collected in the Stuttgart edition of his works (1827–30), made sixty volumes. Those who cannot afford to read them all should by no means miss his “Stimmen der Völker in Liedern” (Folk Songs), and his essays on the “Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.”