Excerpt from Aus Deutschen DörfernAuerbach, his disciple Gottfried Keller, and scores of other men after these, have enfranchised the peasant in a literary sense, have introduced him into our drama and our novel, they have shown that love and hate and ambition and pride, that all human passions and con ¿icts, virtues and vices, are strongest and most dramatic in the village, where they are untempered by etiquette. These men have equalized in literature the hut and the palace, and this turned out to be a reform as beneficial and as far-reaching as any literary reform previous or since.These men democratized the literature of Germany. But they did more, they aroused new interests and opened new fields of research for the sociologist and the historian. Soon a new interest in village and peasant manifested itself everywhere. There arose in each province men of science and men of imagination who investigated the customs, superstitions, legends, and his tory of their native villages, until the literature thus created has grown to.such dimensions that no single mind could possibly assimilate it all. These men have discovered the very sources of the doings and sayings of the peasantry, they have traced the peasants' peculiar ceremonies in different seasons and on different holi days, they have traced even the songs of the children in the village streets back to pagan or early Christian sources, so that to-day the farmer plowing in the valley is linked to the past just as much as the baron above in his ancestral castle.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.