re a salutary ventilation in the miasmic atmosphere of
the continually decreasing circle which at that time described German
literature. In the prose of Heine, which like Beranger glorified Caesar,
slumbered the first germs of the political lyric, which led again out of
the moonlit magic realm of romanticism into the sunny day of history.

A hopeless youthful love for a charming Hamburg maiden was the Muse of
the Heine lyric, whose escutcheon has for a symbol "the laughing tear."
With the simplicity of Herodotus the poet himself relates the fact, the
experience, in the well-known poem with the final strophe:--

"It is an ancient story,
But still 'tis ever new:
To whomsoe'er it happens
His heart is broken too."

We comprehend from biographical facts the inner genesis of the Heine
lyric. Heine was in the position of Werther, but a Werther was for the
nineteenth century an anomaly; a lyric of this sort in yellow nankeen
breeches would have travestied itself. The content of the range of
thought, the circle of world-shaping efforts, had so expanded itself
since the French Revolution that a complete dissolution into sentimental
extravagance had become an impossibility. The justification of the
sentiment was not to be denied; but it must not be regarded as the
highest, as the life-determining element. It needed a rectification
which should again rescue the freedom of the spirit. Humor alone could
accomplish Munchausen's feat, and draw itself by its own hair out of the
morass. Heine expressed his feelings with genuine warmth; he formed them
into drawn pictures and visions; but then he placed himself on the
defensive against them. He is the modern Werther, who instead of loading
his pistol with a ball, loads it with humor. Artistic harmony suffered
under this triumph of spiritual freedom; but that which appeared in his
imitators as voluntary quibbling came from Heine of inner necessity. The
subject of his first songs is the necessary expression of a struggle
between feeling and spirit, between the often visionary dream life of a
sentiment and self-consciousness, soaring free out over the world, which
adjudged absorption in a single feeling as one-sided and unjustified.
Later on, to be sure, these subjects of youthful inspiration became in
Heine himself a satiric-humoristic manner, which regarded as a model
worked much evil in literature. In addition to personal necessity
through one's own experience, there was for