d slender bodies gleam from under their
floods of golden hair, who ride on white horses and throw us provocative
glances, that warm and quicken our innermost hearts. But just as we are
on the point of responding to their fond entreaties we are startled by
the cracking of the wild hunter's whip, and we hear the loud hallo and
huzza of his band, and see them galloping across our path in the eerie
mysterious moonlight. Yes, in "Atta Troll" there is plenty of that
moonshine, of that tender sentimentality, which used to be the principal
stock-in-trade of the German Romanticist._

_But this moonshine and all the other paraphernalia of the Romantic
School Heine handled with all the greater skill, inasmuch as he was no
longer a real Romanticist when he wrote "Atta Troll." He had left the
Romantic School long ago, not without (as he himself tells us) "having
given a good thrashing to his schoolmaster." He was now a Greek, a
follower of Spinoza and Goethe. He was a_ Romantique defroque--_one who
had risen above his neurotic fellow-poets and their hazy ideas and wild
endeavours. But for this very reason he is able to use their mode of
expression with so much the greater skill, and, knowing all their
shortcomings, he could give to his Dreamland a semblance of reality
which they could never achieve. Only after having left a town are we in
a position to judge the height of its church steeple, only as exiles do
we begin to see the right relation in which our country stands to the
rest of the world, and only a poet who had bidden farewell to his party
and school, who had freed himself from Romanticism, could give us the
last, the truest, the most beautiful poem of Romanticism._

_It is possible, even probable, that "Atta Troll" will appeal to a
majority of readers, not through its satire, but through its wonderful
lyrical and romantic qualities--our age being inclined to look askance
at satire, at least at true satire, at satire that, as the current
phrase goes, "means business." Weak satire, aimless satire, humour,
caricature--that is to say satire which uses blank cartridges--this age
of ours will readily endure, nay heartily welcome; but of true satire,
of satire that goes in for powder and shot, that does not only crack,
but kill, it is mortally, and, if one comes to think of it rightly,
afraid. But let even those who object to powder and shot approach "Atta
Troll" without fear or misgiving. They will not be disappointed. They
wil