RÜCKERTFriedrich (1788-1866), an eminent German poet, was born at Schweinfurt on the 16th May 1788. He was educated at the gymnasium of his native place and at the universities of Würzburg and Heidelberg, where he studied law and philology. Having taken his degree, he went to the university of Jena as a “privat-docent”; but this position he soon abandoned. For some time he worked in connexion with the Morgenblatt at Stuttgart. Nearly the whole of the year 1818 he spent in Rome, where he devoted himself to study, especially to the study of the popular poetry of Italy; and afterwards he lived for several years at Coburg. He was appointed a professor of Oriental languages at the university of Erlangen in 1826, and in 1841 he was called to a similar position in Berlin, where he was also made a privy councillor. In 1849 he resigned his professorship at Berlin, and went to live on his estate near Coburg. He died on the 31st January 1866. When Riickert began his literary career, Germany was engaged in her life-and-death struggle with Napoleon; and in his first volume, Deutsche Gedichte, published in 1814 under the name of Freimund Raimar, he gave vigorous expression to the prevailing sentiment of his countrymen. In 1816 appeared Napoleon, eine politische Komodie in drei Stücken, and in 1817 the Kranz der Zeit. He issued a collection of poems, Oestliche Rosen, in 1822; and in 1834-38 his Gesammelte Gedichte were published in six volumes, a selection from which has passed through many editions. Riickert, who was master of thirty languages, made his mark chiefly as a translator of Oriental poetry, and as a writer of poems conceived in the spirit of Oriental masters. Much attention was attracted by Die Verwandlungen des Abu Seid, a translation of Hariri’s Makamen (1826), ...