life. Never has German sculpture been
more frankly realistic than in the days of
Adam Kraft, Peter Vischer, Hans Brügge-
mann, and Tilman Riemenschneider.
Never has it brought forth, by the side
of much that is cumbersome, heavy,
and overcrowded with detail, such a
wealth and variety of human types.
Never has there been a more striking
illustration of the fact that the realistic
tendency in art is not so much the out-
come of a desire to copy the outward
forms of nature, as a symptom of intense
inner activity discharging itself in forms
imbued with the freedom, variety, and
primitiveness of nature herself. Only
two of the foremost
productions of Ger-
man realism belong-
ing to the Renais-
sance may briefly
be considered here:
Adam Kraft's En-
tombment of the
Saviour and Peter
Vischer's Tomb of
St. Sebald.

If we compare Adam Kraft's Entombment of Christ with the Strassburg Death of Mary mentioned before, we find in it less refinement of outline, less harmony of composition. There is a cer

had been driven to crowd into this monument his whole view of the universe. The dumb creation, the elemental forces of nature and history, the playful and the serious moods of the human breast, the great heroic figures of the Christian legend, and the workaday scenes and types of common life-all this is made to surround the restingplace of the saintly man whose earthly career has been run. And in it all, what an abundance of character, what a firm grasp of personality-most of all, perhaps, in the figure of the honest master himself, modestly standing in a niche at the back of the monument, his

tools in his hands, the leather apron hung over his shoulders, the very embodiment of sturdy, sincere, devoted workmanship.

and

That, even amid the artificiality and pompousness of the baroque period and of pseudo-classicism, German sculpture, in a few of its representatives at least, preserved its native truthfulness vigor of the inner life, is proven by a monument which, through the grandeur of its proportions as well as its historical significance, was clearly marked out for the place of honor which it holds in the Germanic Museum: Schlüter's equestrian statue of the Great Elector of Brandenburg.

tain grossness in it, ENTOMBMENT OF CHRIST, BY ADAM KRAFT
Nuremberg, fifteenth century
an apparently willful

emphasis laid on the ordinary and com-
monplace. But, after all, this ordinary
and commonplace exterior serves only
to make us understand all the more
fully the eternal human emotions throb-
bing beneath its surface. As in Rem-
brandt's paintings, we seem to have the
most direct, untrammeled access to the
secrets of the heart. The speechless
woe expressed by Mary's clutching her
son's head and drawing it to her lips
with frantic ecstasy calls up before us
the deepest tragedy of Christ's Passion,
and stirs in us feelings that cannot die.
Peter Vischer's Tomb of Saint Sebald
is almost bewildering in the variety of
its forms. It seems as though the artist

Frederick William, the founder of the Prussian monarchy, was a remarkable mixture of autocratic arbitrariness and single-minded devotion to the common weal. Ruthlessly overriding time-honored class privileges and local statutes, he established the sovereignty of the modern State in his widely scattered territories, and thus welded them together into a political whole. Obstinately adhering to a military absolutism even in matters of civil administration, he was also keenly

alive to the demands of industrial progress and commercial expansion. A Prussian from foot to crown, zealously maintaining the prerogatives of his principality against other States of the empire, he was also the only German prince of his time who deeply felt for the national honor, the only one willing to risk his own State in defense of Germany. Could the

sturdy greatness of this man, could the innermost secret of his personality, be more concretely and impressively brought before us than by this statue, erected in front of his castle at Berlin a few years after his death? Clad in the costume of

tough sinews and heavy limbs; he rides it free and without stirrups; he knows what he is about; he is carrying his destiny in himself; and a victorious future hovers before his eyes.

I may perhaps be permitted to close with a reminiscence of a personal nature. In March, 1902, at the time when Prince Henry of Prussia. was the guest of the American Nation, the German Emperor honored Harvard University by inviting me to an audience at the Royal Castle in Berlin. During this interview the Emperor showed his guest an album containing views of all the works of art which he intended to present to our museum, commenting upon every one of them with astonishing minuteness of knowledge and remarkable precision as well as breadth of judgment. When he came to the statue of the Great Elector, he was particularly emphatic in pointing out its artistic power and fullness of life, summing up his observations in the words: "If that man stood on the Capitoline Hill at Rome, instead of the Lange Brücke at Berlin, the whole world would be at his feet!"

a Roman Imperator, the marshal's staff in his right hand, with the left tightly grasping the reins and holding his horse in check, his head slightly thrown back so that the aquiline nose and the commanding eyes are in full sight, while the manelike hair flows in bold masses over neck and shoulders, he seems the very embodiment of seventeenth-century absolutism. But there is nothing vainglorious in this man, nothing that savors of a Charles II.or a Louis XV. His horse is not a showy thing of parade, but a doughty animal of

A Morning Pledge

By Charles P. Cleaves

I will be glad all day for this cool draught
And the clear drops I dash upon my brow;
For the fresh glint of sunlight on the tree
And the bird singing on the bough.

I will be glad for that stored strength of life
Which lasts the day because the spirit wills;
For the live air that wings from far and breathes
The vigor of the everlasting hills.

What scope of toil, what loss or what reward,
I do not know. It is enough that now

I pledge the day's good cheer with this cool draught
And the drops dashed upon my brow.