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For the German text, Copyright, 1911,
by J. G. Cotta'sche Buchhandlung Nachfolger,
Stuttgart.

COPYRIGHT, 1917,

By D. C. HEATH & Co.

107

INTRODUCTION

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

We find to-day, in the territory adjacent to the Rhine, a number of writers who know how to represent, lovingly and truthfully, the people and scenes of their homeland. Since the days of Romanticism, song and poetry have been silent there; but certain after-effects of this Rhein-Romantik are felt again in contemporary literature, which has as a background greater reality and truth.

The scenes of the best novels of Rudolf Herzog are laid in the romantic, mountainous region of the Rhine; in the regions where the author was born and bred. These places are very real to him, as he has been so close to them almost all his life. To quote a modern author, "he has his roots there, which he can dig up as far back as he can remember." Herzog's novels belong mainly to the active, present-day world, but the scene of Die Burgkinder is laid in the Napoleonic period, i.e., during the War of Liberation.

Rudolf Herzog was born in 1869 in Barmen, a city in the Rhine province on the river Wupper, a tributary of the Rhine. He attended there the Höhere Lehranstalt, and in 1884 he became apprentice in a chemical wholesale house in Düsseldorf on the Rhine. Later he worked in a factory in Elberfeld as Farbentechniker. In 1891-93 he pursued literary studies at the University of Berlin, and in the next year became editorin-chief of a literary bi-monthly magazine, Schwarz und Rot, at Darmstadt. In 1897 he removed to Hamburg, and later to Berlin to pursue literary work. He married the singer

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