A GERMAN READER IN PROSE AND VERSE WITH NOTES AND VOCABULARY BY WILLIAM D. WHITNEY PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT, AND INSTRUCTOR YALE COLLEGE NEW YORK: LEYPOLDT & HOLT F. W. CHRISTERN. BOSTON: S. R. URBINO Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by WILLIAM D. WHITNEY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1870, by In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. THE NEW YORK PRINTING COMPANY, W YORK. PREFACE. THE text of this Reader was published early in 1869, and the work is now completed, later than was intended and expected, by the addition of the Notes and Vocabulary. The selections making up the Reader fall into four, not conspicuously marked, divisions: namely, 1. easy narrative prose; 2. pieces of poetry (nearly all of them whole poems); 3. extracts from dramatic master-pieces; 4. longer and more difficult prose pieces, of various character. It is by no means supposed or meant that any class, or any student, should read the work through in course; the instructor will pass from one division and extract to another, as his taste and his apprehension of the wants of his pupils shall suggest. My own way, with a class of beginners, has been to read first one or two of the selections from Krummacher and one of the stories that follow, next to choose pieces of various style from among the poems, then to take up a dramatic extract (that from Schiller is the easiest) or a prose piece (Goethe's Carnival at Rome being the least difficult)-by which time, a class will be prepared to undertake almost anything that the volume contains. A frequent chango of tone and style in the matter read helps, as every teacher knows, to keep up the spirit and interest of a class. Originality has been not at all aimed at in making the selections; many of them are among the most familiar pieces in the language, and to be found in every Reader. What I have sought is variety, and real merit in the pieces taken; that any one who shall read the whole body of texts assembled may have gained a fair taste of the great and noble German literature, and also something of an introduction to almost every style he will have to deal with in his further studies. In the Notes, I have meant to explain such idioms as were not more properly treated in the Vocabulary, the more difficult constructions, and the principal references and allusions; to give so numerous references to the Grammar as should accustom the student to using it aright in connection with his general reading; to set forth the connection of those pieces which are fragments only; and to offer brief and summary notices of the authors quoted. These notices would, of course, have needed to be made much fuller and more elaborate, if the body of selections had been made up with any distinct reference to the history of German literature, or intended to illustrate its development. The intelligent teacher will not be at a loss for sources from which to fill up and supplement my scanty statements-even though there is not yet, as there ought to be, a good and authoritative history in English of German literature. Some will perhaps find too much of repetition in the Grammar references; of this, something might and would have been avoided if the Reader had been intended to be read straight through in course: where selection from one part and another was intended, it was not practicable to give a thoroughly progressive character to the Notes; although in general, it is believed, such a character has been secured. The design of the added Vocabulary is, in part, to save time and labor to the scholar. To gain a tolerable mastery of the German vocabulary is so very serious a task, that he who undertakes it is fairly entitled to have its beginning made easy to him by special helps-to be introduced through a briefer and more manageable hand-book to the full dictionary which must later become, and must so long continue, his inseparable friend and aid. One who has made himself pretty familiar, by repeated reading, with the amount of words and phrases here given, will have gone far toward breaking the back (as the saying is) of the whole great task. But also, in part to aid this same process, in part for the sake of other advantages of a general disciplinary |