SEUME AND THE ENGLISH
55
became fourrier for his company, and was put in charge of its
records. He undoubtedly met Englishmen, Canadians, and even
loyal Americans, but he apparently did not mix with them socially,
or he would have remarked on it. In Halifax he began his long
friendship with Karl Ludwig A. H. von Miinchhausen (1759-1836),
a junior officer at the time.20
In his other writings Seume often looks back to the year he
spent in Canada. In the Spaziergang he refers to a warning given
to him by a Benedictine abbot on climbing Mt. Etna in April during
the cold season. Seume writes : “However, I did not permit myself
to be crushed by this information; for I would not have been
worthy the experience of the North American and Russian winters”
(W, ∏, 32). Sicily, he states, “looks dreadful in the interior. Here
and there some spots are cultivated ; but the whole is a desert, the
like of which I have scarcely seen in America” (W, I, 331-332). In
Mein Sommer he tells of a rest he took while walking through
Denmark. He writes: “As I now sat alone on my knapsack and
once more traveled many a road from Hallifax [sic] to Syracuse
and lived through many an hour . . .” (W, HI, 145). In the same
book he also mentions a piece of agricultural equipment, referred
to by another traveler, Karl Gottlob Kiittner (1755-1805), on which
wheat or grass is dried after cutting. He remarks : “I have noticed
them also in North America, and I would be very surprised, if
one should not find them in Scotland as well” (W, III, 176). There
is little doubt that his stay in Canada was indelibly impressed on
his memory.
This is even more obvious in his poems. Apart from the first two
lines of “Oeser’s Manen” which read : “Lonely I stood and thought
of the time which, reaping men, / I had lived by the shores of the
Saint Lawrence [Laurenzstrom] and the Vistula, / . . .” (W, VII,
176), several of these owe their very existence to Seume’s ex-
perience in Canada. The most famous of the poems is undoubtedly
“Der Wilde,” with the well-known first lines “A Canadian, who
had not yet discovered / That the civility of Europeans is only a
veneer, / . . .” (W, VII, 72-75) which appeared in Schiller’s Neue
Thalia,21 where the opening line reads “An American, who. . . .”
Less well known is this excerpt from Seume’s letter to Schiller,
accompanying the poem, dated Leipzig, June 5, 1793: “The incident
which I describe in 'dem Wilden,’ was told me as a fact by some
trustworthy people during the last war, with the supplementary
information, that the farmer was a German” (PR, p. 89). In a
footnote to the poem Seume says: “This tale I have heard as a