Zwischen Runenforschung und germanischer Religionsgeschichte besteht—trotz der grossen sachlichen Verschiedenheit der beiden Forschungsgebiete—eine ziemlich enge Interessengemeinschaft, die sich keineswegs nur auf magische Inschriften in Runencharakteren, ihre Lesung, Deutung und Datierung erstreckt. Eine sozusagen organische Verbindung, die über das rein Inhaltliche weit hinausgeht, wird dadurch hergestellt, dass das Rätsel der Entstehung der Runenschrift von zwei Hauptproblemen der germanischen Religionsgeschichte nicht getrennt werden kann, nämlich (1) der Geschichte des Wodan-Odinkultes, und (2) der Frage der Beeinflussung des germanischen Runenzaubers durch fremdländische magische Systeme.

Re-enforcement of negation by the application of words or phrases denoting small value or amount was not unknown in Latin, and was a practice that naturally carried over into the Romance languages. In referring to terms thus employed in Romania, grammarians do not always quote sources or cite the earliest text in which a term appears; to remedy this deficiency for early Italian, where necessary and possible, is the purpose of the present discussion, as well as to list additional terms that previous investigators have overlooked.

Inviting the reader to exercise his own imagination with the aid of hints and cues rather than putting his meaning in prosaic terms, the meditative author of Piers Plowman takes one of the well-known roads of poetical composition. He stands with the poets who find it more to their liking to hint than to assert. On this account their work becomes relatively difficult to interpret. Time further adds to the obstacles implicit in their technique. Hence many of the controversies of scholars and the justification for what may at first glance seem a wasteful commentary. One cannot expect to leap suddenly to an understanding of so subtle and complex an allegory as Piers Plowman. Only through honest controversy and repeated effort is marked progress to be made.

In this paper I shall trace Spenser's career in Ireland during the uncertain years, 1584–89, We know that the poet during this period was clerk of the Council of Munster, that he acted as secretary to the president of the province, and that he almost certainly, like his successor Richard Boyle, the Earl of Cork, “attended the Lord President in all his employments.”

All students of Milton and most casual visitors to the British Museum know that Milton's family Bible is now part of the manuscript collection of the Museum (MS. Add. 32,310), and that it is regularly on display in one of the exhibition cases. It is of course kept open at the page which contains the well-known entries of births and deaths of various members of Milton's family, including himself, and few people realize that it contains anything else of interest.

Biographers of Marvell have found themselves in a curious predicament. Although a considerable number of Marvell's letters have come down to us and evidence of other kinds is at least comparatively extensive, it has proved impossible to arrive at any clear understanding of his character. That fundamental uncertainty is chiefly a result of the fact that at two or three critical points the evidence is limited and enigmatic.

Ubrich Knoche in seinem schönen Artikel “Betrachtungen über Horazens Kunst der satirischen Gesprächsführung” (Philologus, xc [1936], S.373 ff.) zeigt, von demhorazischen Präzept ausgehend:

Charles Lamb, in the whimsical autobiographical sketch which he wrote in 1827, boasted that he “was the first to draw the public attention to the old English Dramatists, in a work called ‘Specimens of English Dramatic Writers,‘ who lived about the time of Shakespeare.” Lamb's first biographer, Talfourd, pictures the Specimens as slowly and almost imperceptibly working out “the genial purpose of the editor in renewing a taste for the great contemporaries of Shakespeare.” Ainger describes Lamb as a dispeller of ignorance and remarks of the Specimens:

Students of poetry have long regretted that John Livingston Lowes did not include in his remarkable The Road to Xanadu a study of Christabel. It would have been only fitting for the story of the origin of this poem to have appeared side by side with those of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. Professor Lowes thus explained the omission:

THE main struggle between the French Romanticists and Classicists occurred in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Hostilities, however, had begun much earlier. MM. Edmond Egglie and Pierre Martino in the first volume of their work Le Débat romantique en France have described the conflict from 1813 to 1816.

Friedrich Hebbel, nächst Ibsen der grösste Dramatiker der germanischen Welt im 19. Jahrhundert, ist oft der Dramatiker des Realismus genannt worden. Nun ist es bezeichnend, dass Edna Purdie in ihrem Buch über Hebbel sich jeder geistesgeschichtlichen oder stilgeschichtlichen Einordnung von Hebbels Werk enthält und vor allem Wort und Begriff des Realismus meidet. Vielleicht mit Recht, wenn man bedenkt, wie sehr das Wort missbraucht und wie schillernd der Begriff geworden ist. Aber gerade bei Hebbel Hesse sich zu einer Vertiefung des Begriffes durchstossen, wenn man nämlich Realismus nicht als einen äusserlich-stilistischen Terminus fasst, der ein Mehr oder Minder an Tatsachenfreude, an Detail der Umweltschilderung bezeichnet, sondern unter Realismus eine prinzipiell bejahende Haltung zu den Realitäten des Lebens versteht.

In dem literarischen Nachlaß des im Jahre 1894 in Stuttgart verstorbenen Romandichters Otto Müller befinden sich zahlreiche unveröffentlichte Briefe von zum Teil hervorragenden deutschen Schriftstellern des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Es sind im ganzen 2664 Briefe, die von Gustav Müller, dem im Jahre 1918 in Genf verstorbenen Sohne Otto Müllers, auf das sorgfältigste gesichtet und chronologisch zusammengestellt wurden. In der Sammlung befinden sich Briefe von Th. Mügge, F. W. Hackländer, Hermann Hettner, Paul Heyse, Carl Emil Franzos, J. G. Fischer, Carl Gutzkow und Wilhelm Raabe, um nur einige zu nennen. Dieser Nachlaß, eine wahre Fundgrube für den Literarhistoriker, ist gegenwärtig im Besitz des Verfassers dieser Seiten, eines Enkels Otto Müllers.

François Beslay observes in le Correspondant, in 1863:

There is a belief current among Irish people but not accepted by critics that William Blake was of immediate Irish descent. This belief may explain the special appeal of Blake to Irishmen. A more probable explanation of Blake's appeal to the Irish lies in the interest of Irish people in symbolic and philosophical writing. In any event both George William Russell, or A E as he was known, and William Butler Yeats discovered in Blake a kindred spirit.