d finished in the literature and the opinion of the present, is
mistaken and withdrawn. It is dead, like every picture; there is lacking
the living, changing play of features. We have of Heine only one picture
before us; of our great poets several. Goethe in his "storm and stress,"
in Frankfurt, Strassburg, and Wetzlar,--the ardent lover of a Friedrike
of Sesenheim, the handsome, joyous youth, is different in our minds from
the stiff and formal Weimar minister; the youthful Apollo different from
the Olympic Jupiter. There lies a young development between, that we
feel and are curious to know. It is similar with Schiller. The poet of
the 'Robbers' with its motto _In tyrannos_, the fugitive from the
military school; and the Jena professor, the Weimar court councilor who
wrote 'The Homage of the Arts,'--are two different portraits.

But Heine is to our view always the same, always the representative of
humor with "a laughing tear" in his escutcheon, always the poetic
anomaly, coquetting with his pain and scoffing it away. Young or old,
well or ill, we do not know him different.

And yet this poet too had a development, upon which at different times
different influences worked....

The first epoch in this course of development may be called the
"youthful"; the 'Travel Pictures' and the lyrics contained in it form
its brilliant conclusion. This is no storm-and-stress period in the way
that, as Schiller and Goethe passed through it, completed works first
issued under its clarifying influence. On the contrary, it is
characteristic of Heine that we have to thank this youthful epoch for
his best and most peculiarly national poems. The wantonness and the
sorrows of this youth, in their piquant mixture, created these songs
permeated by the breath of original talent, whose physiognomy, more than
all that follow later, bears the mark of the kind and manner peculiar to
Heine, and which for a long time exercised in our literature through a
countless host of imitators an almost epidemic effect. But these lyric
pearls, which in their purity and their crystalline polish are a lasting
adornment of his poet's crown, and belong to the lyric treasures of our
national literature, were also gathered in his first youthful epoch,
when he still dived down into the depths of life in the diving-bell of
romanticism.

Although Heinrich Heine asserted of himself that he belonged to the
"first men of the century," since he was born in the middle of