51�Թ�

Of these the first and least important comprises eight narrative religious poems, in leonine hexameters or distichs.

The story which inspired it begins at distich No. 972, and is as follows: An observer of spiritual things approached the sea And said �O sea, why are you blue?

I myself could have responded to the royal suspiria with one distich.

This collection of distichs, written in collaboration with Schiller, was prompted by the indifference and animosity of contemporary criticism, and its disregard for what the two poets regarded as the higher interests of German poetry.

The rhyme was designed to honour the poet's father, who set the forest here; but accident must have stayed the stone-cutter's hand and left the distich incomplete.