To reproduce their speech, even if possible, were of course sadly out of place at this day; for the German, even of the early settlers, was represented by such various dialects as Swabian, Würtemberger, Bavarian, Swiss, Hessian, Palatinate, and others; and though these were all German dialects, yet since those days there has been such a copious infusion of English words, that to-day Pennsylvania-German, though "it is still, in the articulation of its bones and its general form and spirit, the tongue of the Rhine country,"[2] is none the less neither German nor English, but "a hybrid, non-descript jargon,"[3] at best an Americanized dialect of the German, but a dialect able to produce beautiful flowers in the fields of lyric poetry under the cultivation of such as Harbaugh, Hark, Zimmerman, Zeigler, Fisher, Grumbine, and others.
Pennsylvania-German being a dialect not of the almost universal English tongue but of the German, and what is especially to the point, a fast declining dialect with but a small remnant who can speak and understand it in the vernacular, the author feels not only that he should by employing this dialect address himself to an exceedingly small audience, but might, moreover, justly incur the charge of pedantry and affectation.
Thus while it is true that the greater number of the Sisters and Brothers of the Kloster were Germans and spoke the mother tongue in their daily intercourse, yet after all language is only the means of conveying ideas, thoughts, and these we know have a language understood by all.
Moreover, this volume is not presented from the standpoint of the antiquarian or philologist. The Brothers and Sisters of Ephrata, though celibates, sworn to the love of the celestial Eve and the heavenly Bridegroom, were none the less flesh and flood, subject to the same passions and temptations as the men and women of the present day. They too had "eyes, hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions," and were "fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer." In a word, they were men and women of like passions with ourselves.
It is of such men and women the author writes; men and women unused "to the courtliness of state, unskilled in the hollowness of vain compliment, untutored in the frippery and polish of artificial society, unacquainted with the insincerity and diplomacy of the wider world, removed from kith and kin and thrown upon their own resources among strangers and amid new surroundings."[4]
The author, that he may not be held to have drawn too deeply from his neighbor's well, fully acknowledges his great indebtedness to his friend, Mr. Sachse. Indeed, to do exact justice, it must be said that this volume contains nothing more than a romance wound about the facts, incidents, traditions, and descriptions, taken by the author from the "German Sectarians," with the kind permission of Mr. Sachse.
Acknowledgment of indebtedness should also be made to Rev. J. Max Hark and Hon. Samuel W. Pennypacker, Governor of Pennsylvania, for the use of translations, portions of which are prefixed to Chapters XV. and XIX. It should also be added that the initial letters used through the book, as well as the design on the cover, are made from reproductions of pen-work drawings executed by the Ephrata Sisterhood.
The Author.