like the Songs above mentioned, are printed without titles and are successive sentences or paragraphs in the poet’s own love story.  This he tells over and over again, without monotony, because the story gains in significance as the lover gains in experience, because each time he finds for it a new set of symbols, and because the symbols become more and more objective as the poet’s horizon broadens.  Then come a few pieces of religious content (culminating in The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar), the poems in the Journey to the Hartz (the most striking of which are animated by the poetry of folk-lore)—­these poems clearly transitional to the poetry of the ocean which Heine wrote with such vigor in the two cycles on the North Sea.  The movement is a steady climax.

The truth of the foregoing observations can be tested only by an examination of the entire Book of Songs.  The total effect is one of arrangement.  The order of the sections is chronological; the order of the poems within the sections is logical; and some poems were altered to make them fit into the scheme.  Each was originally the expression of a moment; and the peculiarity of Heine as a lyric poet is his disposition to fix a moment, however fleeting, and to utter a feeling, of however slight consequence to humanity it might at first blush seem to be.  In the Journey to the Hartz he never lost an opportunity to make a point; in his lyrical confessions he suppressed no impulse to self-revelation; and seldom did his mastery of form fail to ennoble even the meanest substance.

Some of Heine’s most perfect products are his smallest.  Whether, however, a slight substance can be fittingly presented only in the briefest forms, or a larger matter calls for extended treatment, the method is the same, and the merit lies in the justness and suggestiveness of details.  Single points, or points in juxtaposition or in succession, not the developed continuity of a line, are the means to the effect which Heine seeks.  Connecting links are left to be supplied by the imagination of the reader.  Even in such a narrative poem as Belshazzar the movement is staccato; we are invited to contemplate a series of moments; and if the subject is impiety and swift retribution, we are left to infer the fact from the evidence presented; there is neither editorial introduction nor moralizing conclusion.  Similarly with The Two Grenadiers, a presentation of character in circumstance, a translation of pictorial details into terms of action and prophecy; and most strikingly in The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar, a poem of such fundamentally pictorial quality that it has been called a triptych, three depicted scenes in a little religious drama.