About a year after his famous journey, from the effects of which he had completely recovered, Georg Herwegh published a second volume of Gedichte eines Lebendigen ("Poems of a Living Man"), in which some new and valuable qualities are combined with those characterising the first. There is more confidence and more fire, and both enthusiasms and animosities are less vague. We have fewer illusions, and a clearer understanding of ends and means; no more appeals to a king to lead the onward march of his people, or to God to give freedom and happiness to all the nations of the earth. Frederick William IV. had extinguished Herwegh's faith in princes, and Ludwig Feuerbach his faith in God. But we gain the impression that the dawning light in men's minds has broadened into the light of day.
In the old dawn-songs, which Shakespeare has imitated in Romeo and Juliet, the young girl always tries to keep her lover with her by declaring that it is not sunlight but moonlight that he sees, not the lark but the nightingale that he hears. This idea is cleverly reversed in the poem Morgenzuruf ("Cry of the Morning"):
"Die Lerche war's, nicht die Nachtigall,
Die eben am Himmel geschlagen:
Schon schwingt er sich auf, der Sonnenball,
Vom Winde des Morgens getragen.
Der Tag, der Tag ist erwacht!
Die Nacht,
Die Nacht soll blutig verenden.
Heraus wer an's ewige Licht noch glaubt,
Ihr Schläfer, die Rosen der Liebe vom Haupt,
Und ein flammendes Schwert um die Lenden![3]
Unglückliche Liebe ("Unhappy Love") is an epigram pointed against kings:
"Nicht an den Königen liegt's—die Könige lieben die Freiheit,
Aber die Freiheit liebt leider die Könige nicht."[4]
The tone of Herwegh's previous volume, even in its apparently irreligious utterances, had been theistic. On the adjuration to tear the crosses from the graves and use them as swords, follows the line: "God forgives the deed ye do." But in this new volume we find a poem in which Feuerbach's praises are sung because he has attacked the doctrine of immortality, and a Song of the Heathen, which is more daring in its mockery than any similar poem of Heine's:
"Die Heiden—'s ist doch Schade um solch Ingenium.
Sie hiessen Vier gerade und nahmen Fünf für krumm.
Auch hatt' die Jungfernschaft ein End, sobald die Magd ein Kind gebar,
Dieweil das neue Testament noch nicht erfunden war."
And, unlike Auersperg, who makes a distinction between the good and the bad priest, Herwegh holds the whole brotherhood in derision, mocks at Catholic and Protestant, shorn and unshorn, in the witty, untranslatable epigram:
"Ob sie katholisch geschoren, ob protestantisch gescheitelt,
Gleichviel—immer geräth man den Gesellen in's Haar."
He had pricked before, now he stung; the singer of liberty had developed into a herald and preparer of the approaching revolution.