German Composition

This practical guide turns English prose into a disciplined path toward idiomatic German, combining theory, graded exercises, and carefully chosen literary extracts for students, teachers, and examination candidates. Hermann Lange insists that translation is an act of analysis, not word-for-word substitution, and his notes and appendix present German syntax, moods, construction, and orthographic reform in concise, usable form. The lessons are built for repeated oral and written practice, with correction, review, and a second oral translation designed to fix vocabulary, idiom, and sentence structure in memory. Around this core, the book offers a wide-ranging anthology of moral, historical, and literary prose by writers such as Thackeray, Carlyle, Dickens, Macaulay, Kingsley, Shakespeare, Irving, Smiles, and Beecher. Its selections move from maxims, anecdotes, and reflections on honesty, forgiveness, habit, education, and self-culture to scenes of battle, voyage, and biography, including a Quaker's lesson in self-mastery, an argument for education through lived experience, Goethe's praise of English wholeness, and a dramatic tale of Margaret Lambrun's attempt on Queen Elizabeth. The result is a language text that aims to build accuracy, fluency, character, and understanding at once. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.