). We must, of course, assume that the
reader of this little volume is well acquainted both with English
and German.
The reader will perceive that the writer has taken another
flight in "Hans Breitmann's Christmas," and many of the later
ballads, from what he did in those preceding; and exception might
be taken to his choice of subjects, and treatment of them, if the
language employed by him were a fixed dialect - that is, a
language arrested at a certain stage of its progress; for in that
case he would have had to subordinate his pictures to the narrow
sphere of the realistic incidents of a given locality. But the
imperfect English utterances of the German, newly arrived in
America, coloured more or less by the peculiarities of his native
idiom, do not make, and never will make a dialect, for the simple
reason that, in proportion to his intelligence, his
opportunities, and the length of time spent by him among his new
English-speaking countrymen, he will sooner or later rid himself
of the crudenesses of his speech, thus preventing it from
becoming fixed.
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