Excerpt from Hermann and Dorothea: From the German The treatment which this exquisite poem of Goethe has received at my hands may appear to the scholar to savor of vandalism or sacrilege. The great bard forgive me! But I have this plea to ofier: The verse of the original is hexameter, at best an almost unmanageable metre in our language. To translate it into the same verse, therefore, is beyond the skill even of a Longfellow; to translate it into another would destroy one of its principal charms. So that if English readers are ever to enjoy this beautiful creation of genius, the poetic form must, in any case, be sacrificed. And yet, unlike many works of art, its chief value does not rest in the form only, perfect as that is. A golden statue, wrought out with curious and elaborate skill by the hand of a master, loses, it is true, its artistic worth and beauty in the furnace, but the gold remains; so. 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 technology 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.