Excerpt from Balladen Und Romanzen: Selected and Arranged With Notes and Literary Introduction In the Introduction I have given a cursory sketch of the origin of German ballad-poetry, and of the various stages through which it has passed. At the same time I have pointed out the charac teristics of the German ballads in each of the three periods into which it seemed to me advisable to divide it, and I have added an estimate of German ballad-poetry in general. It will be seen from that sketch that the first impulse came from this country, but that in the course of time the German poets struck out their own path and produced a most brilliant cycle of original ballads. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art techlogy 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.