Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source:
http://www.archive.org/details/studentlifegerm02corngoog
THE
STUDENT-LIFE OF GERMANY.
THE
STUDENT-LIFE OF GERMANY:
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
AUTHOR OF "THE RURAL LIFE OF ENGLAND," "BOOK OF THE SEASONS," ETC.
FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MS. OF DR. CORNELIUS.
CONTAINING NEARLY FORTY OF THE
MOST FAMOUS STUDENT SONGS.
THINK OFT, YE BRETHREN;
THINK OF THE GLADNESS OF OUR YOUTHFUL PRIME,--
IT COMETH NOT AGAIN,--THAT GOLDEN TIME!
The Commers Book.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY AND HART.
MDCCCXLII.
C. Sherman &, Co. Printers, 19 St. James Street
"How shall I call thee, thou high, thou rough, thou noble, thoubarbaric, thou loveable, unharmonious, song-full, repelling, yetrefreshing life of the Burschen years? How shall I describe you, yegolden hours, ye choral-songs of brotherly love? What tone shallI give to you to make myself understood? What colours to thee, thounever-comprehended chaos? I shall describe thee? Never! Thy ludicrousoutside lies open; the layman sees that; one can describe that to him;but thy inner and lovely ore, the miner only knows who goes singingwith his brethren into the deep shaft. He brings up gold; pure, solidgold; be it much or little, it is still of high value. But this is nothis whole booty. What he sees there, he may not describe to the layman:it were all too strange, and too precious for his ear. There arespirits in the deep that no other ear can comprehend; no other eyeperceive. Music floats through those halls, which to every uninitiatedear sounds empty and unmeaning. But to him who has felt with it andsung with it, it gives a peculiar consecration; when he, moreover,smiles over the hole in his cap which he has brought back with him as asymbol.
"Old Grandfather! now know I what thou undertook when thou held thyannual, solitary, intercalary day! Thou too hadst thy companions in thedays of thy youth, and the water stood in thy gray eyelashes when thoumarked one in thy stambook as entombed."
Hauff's Rathskeller in Bremen.
PREFACE.
We have had various peeps and snatches of the Student-life of Germany,from time to time, in our periodicals, but we have nothing like acomplete, and faithful account of it. Some of those accounts too, areby English writers, who had at best but a partial and passing view ofthis singular state of existence, and could not, however much theymight have seen of it, enter into it and comprehend it with the fulnessof apprehension and feeling which a native possesses. When I,therefore, was thrown, on my first visit to Germany, into the midst ofits students, I began to inquire for a volume written by a German,which should lay open the whole interior of that, whose surface was sostrange and so picturesque. I was told that no such thing, of any valueor com