Finally 'The Working Classes' begins at line 262: "Domestic bliss / (Or call it comfort, by a humbler name.) / How art thou blighted for the poor man's heart!" (Wordsworth 1959: 268,270-1, 273).

Though the anthology contains many more poems that have liberal political and social themes, Wordsworth appears in the main as a lyric poet of nature and childhood. It is important to note, however, that in choosing to present The Excursion as a poem that explored the politics of class engendered by the factory system, Freiligrath departed from Jacobsen's reading of the poem. The Briefe an eine deutsche Edelfrau devotes an entire chapter to The Excursion, quoting from it at length. The passages Jacobsen chose, however, are very much in accord with the English Victorian reading of The Excursion, presenting it as a spiritual antidote to a view of the modern world as a place in danger of becoming engulfed by secularised political opinion and the worship of materialism. In this reading Wordsworth's philosophical appeal to the natural world as a guide to religious belief and social conduct depoliticises the poet in a way Freiligrath was not prepared to do.

Freiligrath's declared intention (stated in the Introduction to the 1853 edition of the Anthology) was that his collection of poetry should be "a welcome present to every lover of English poetry" in Germany, England and America. Genteel and politically neutral as this may sound, however, the idiosyncratic choice of Excursion extracts alone illustrates that political

motivation born of the conflicts that marked the evolution of 19 century German nationalism were never far from the surface in Freiligrath's mind.

Though The Rose, Thistle and Shamrock consisted of poems in English, the issue of translation remains inimical to the political agenda of conflict that runs through Freiligrath's career. The technical problems of translating Wordsworth into German - compared to Burns, Byron, or Hemans in lyric mode - has already been discussed. In her substantial biography and anthology of Wordsworth, published in 1893, Marie Gothein quoted Goethe on the generic problems of translating English into German: "If you replace the many short and striking monosyllabic English words with German compounds or many syllabic equivalents, all the power and effect of the words get lost" (Gothein 1893: vi-vii). Faced with these difficulties, Freiligrath,Gothein, and Andreas Baumgartner (whose 1897 anthology of Wordsworth's poetry was accompanied by a short biography) all opted to reproduce the rhythms and the sound of Wordsworth's poetry as best they could in the German language. An attempt at precision in this respect frequently forced them into a very free paraphrase of the sense of the lines. Some of Gothein's extracts from The Prelude are at first reading very difficult to place as a result of this. Freiligrath's rendering of 'Yew Trees' is another case in point.

Gothein, however, insists that it was not just the way that Wordsworth uses language that marks him out as 'durch und durch englsch(Gothein 1893: ii). For her - as for Freiligrath - there were equally important political issues involved. That phrase, *durch und durch englisch', occurs in a quotation Gothein used from the historian Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886).

Ranke had used it in the course of a funeral oration he gave for another German Historian of his generation, J. M. Lappenberg (1794-1865). Ranke was recalling Lappenberg's enthusiasm for Wordsworth as a young man, and he goes on to say that it was not just the 'Englishness' of Wordsworth's poetry that intrigued Lappenberg and others in the years immediately following the fall of Napoleon, it was also his 'views', and his ideas'. To produce her biography Gothein worked closely with Professor William Knight, an influential figure in Wordsworth scholarship in England,

absorbing an endemically English enthusiasm for the poet, then seeking to impart that strangeness to her German readers in a way that rendered it both familiar, yet still peculiar to its English cultural context. Gothein suggests that her German readers would do well to try and understand more about this most English of Englishmen, even if they fail to find his poetry as appealing as she clearly did. The European powers were taking increasingly careful stock of each other as the century drew to a close, and Jacobsen's, Freiligrath's, Gothein's, and Baumgartner's translated Wordsworth should be

set in the context of the constant interplay between literary culture and politics throughout this period, and the various conflicts they reflected. 

To begin to understand the nature of the English in the late nineteenth century, Gothein implies, you might do worse than add a study of the work of a very popular, patriotic English poet to your reading of Lappenberg. Lappenberg made his reputation in Germany as an archivist, and an historian of Anglo-Saxon England and England under the Normans. A History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings was published in 1834, A History of England under the Norman Kings was published in 1857; both were translated into English by Benjamin Thorpe. Beyond the painstaking compilation of factual detail, Lappenberg is preoccupied by the processes of imperialism, and by the time Gothein was researching her life of Wordsworth, her interest in the poet does appear to be at least in part informed by her interest in the joint destinies of England and Germany as the century drew to a close.

Gothein describes how Lappenberg arrived in Edinburgh in 1817, aged 23. Educated in German Classical literature, he was excited by the discovery of what to him was a new 'cultural element' ('neues Kulturelement'), and - according to Gothein- the enthusiasm for Wordsworth was in its genesis.... Crabb Robinson had written:You don't dare to praise Wordsworth in public, yet, but tête-à-tête you would admit, that you are one of his admirers.'” (Gothein 1893: iv) What had excited Lappenberg then might just as easily trouble many Germans of Gothein's generation. She alludes to a prophesy by De Quincey in his essay on Wordsworth, first published in Tait's Magazine in 1839, that the English language would colonise the world in the next 150 years, with the result that everyone would be reading The Excursion, and many of the shorter poems, with the ease and regularity that they now read Shakespeare.

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