Mit unsrer schlechten Zeit!
Wer bei dem Weine singt und lacht,
Den thut, ihr Herrn, nicht in die Acht!
Ein Kind ist Fröhligkeit.”[15]
Wilhelm Müller evidently felt that when words are not deeds, or do not lead to deeds, silence is more worthy of a man than speech. He never became a political poet, at least never in his own country. But when the rising of the Greeks appealed to those human sympathies of Christian nations which can never be [pg 107] quite extinguished, and when here, too, the faint-hearted policy of the great powers played and bargained over the great events in the east of Europe instead of trusting to those principles which alone can secure the true and lasting well-being of states, as well as of individuals, then the long accumulated wrath of the poet and of the man burst forth and found utterance in the songs on the Greek war of independence. Human, Christian, political, and classical sympathies stirred his heart, and breathed that life into his poems, which most of them still possess. It is astonishing how a young man in a small isolated town like Dessau, almost shut out from intercourse with the great world, could have followed step by step the events of the Greek revolution, seizing on all the right, the beauty, the grandeur of the struggle, making himself intimately acquainted with the dominant characters, whilst he at the same time mastered the peculiar local coloring of the passing events. Wilhelm Müller was not only a poet, but he was intimately acquainted with classic antiquity. He knew the Greeks and the Romans. And just as during his stay in Rome he recognized at all points the old in what was new, and everywhere sought to find what was eternal in the eternal city, so now with him the modern Greeks were inseparably joined with the ancient. A knowledge of the modern Greek language appeared to him the natural completion of the study of old Greek; and it was his acquaintance with the popular songs of modern as well as of ancient Hellas that gave the color which imparted such a vivid expression of truth and naturalness to his own Greek songs. It was thus that the “Griechen Lieder” arose, which appeared in separate but rapid numbers, and found great favor with the people. But [pg 108] even these “Griechen Lieder” caused anxiety to the paternal governments of those days:—
“Ruh und Friede will Europa—warum hast du sie gestört?
Warum mit dem Wahn der Freiheit eigenmächtig dich bethört?
Hoff' auf keines Herren Hülfe gegen eines Herren Frohn:
Auch des Türkenkaisers Polster nennt Europa einen Thron.”[16]
His last poems were suppressed by the Censor, as well as his “Hymn on the Death of Raphael Riego.” Some of these were first published long after his death; others must have been lost whilst in the Censor's hands.