Theodor Storm's last and longest “Novelle,” Der Schimmelreiter, may be regarded as his masterpiece. Under the stress of experience, especially private sorrow, Storm's art matured and deepened toward the end of his life. The writer of soft, sentimental idylls, perfumed with faded flowers and blurred by hopeless reminiscence, became a tragic poet, coping in strong, sharp-lined, cogent “Novellen” with the bitter realities of life. Among these later works, again, there is observable both a deepening and a simplification. From the historical remoteness of the “Chroniknovellen,” the. stylized “Minnewelt” of Ein Fest auf Haderslevhuus or the artificial archaism of Aquis Submersus, the Schimmelreiter at length comes home to treat, unsentimentally and in timeless terms, the tragedy of a modern man.