[3] "Die erste Bürgerpflicht ist Ruhe," These words occur in an official notice posted in the streets of Berlin after the defeat of Jena.
CHAMISSO
[III]
SPIRIT OF THE OPPOSITION
The most notable of the freedom-loving poets and prose authors of the period are embodiments of some of the shades of opinion which have been alluded to. Adalbert von Chamisso, who, by virtue of his famous prose tale, Peter Schlemihl, and certain of his qualities, belongs to the German Romantic School, while in other respects he approaches more nearly to the French ideal of thought and writing, is, in some of his most characteristic poems, and even in his epigrams, a mouthpiece of the grief of the better sort over the steadily growing political and social reaction. As early as 1822, in his poem, Die goldene Zeit ("The Golden Age"), he ridicules an age in which that man is a Jacobin who has openly expressed his belief that 2 and 2 make 4; in the Nachtwächterlied ("Watchman's Song") he scoffs at the power of the Jesuits; in Joshua and Das Dampfross ("The Steam Horse"), at those who have robbed time of its secret, and learned how to force it backwards day by day; in Das Gebet der Wittwe ("The Widow's Prayer") he gives a darkly pessimistic picture of the heartless rule of the powers that be, with its complete indifference to the fate of the common people; finally he sums up his view of the times in this bitterly humorous quatrain, which greets us sadly in the form of a four-part catch: