Volunteers came from far, many of whom were to ride with Luetzow's irregular horse in his wild ventures.

Most noteworthy of these was the gifted young poet, Korner, a Saxon by birth, who now forsook a life of ease, radiant with poetic promise, at the careless city of Vienna, to follow the Prussian eagle.

"A great time calls for great hearts," he wrote to his father: "am I to write vaudevilles when I feel within me the courage and strength for joining the actors on the stage of real life ?" Alas! for him the end was to be swift and tragic.

Not long after inditing an ode to his sword, he fell in a skirmish near Hamburg.
Germany mourned his loss; but she mourned still more that her greatest poet, Goethe, felt no throb of national enthusiasm.

The great Olympian was too much wrapped up in his lofty speculations to spare much sympathy for struggling mortals below: "Shake your chains, if you will: the man (Napoleon) is too strong for you: you will not break them." Such was his unprophetic utterance at Dresden to the elder Korner.