It is in pieces like these that we find Heine most successfully making of himself the interpreter of objects in the outside world.  The number of such objects is greater than is everywhere believed—­though naturally his success is surest in the case of objects congenial to him, and the variety of these is not great.  Indeed, the outside world, even when he appears to treat it most objectively, proves upon closer examination to be in the vast majority of cases only a treasure-trove of symbols for the expression of his inner self.  Thus, Poor Peter is the narrative of a humble youth unfortunate in love, but poor Peter’s story is Heine’s; otherwise, we may be sure, Heine would not have thought it worth the telling.  Nothing could seem to be less the property of Heine than The Lorelei; nevertheless, he has given to this borrowed subject so personal a turn that instead of the siren we see a human maiden, serenely indifferent to the effect of her charms, which so take the luckless lover that, like the boatman, he, Heine, is probably doomed ere long to death in the waves.

Toward the outside world, then, Heine’s habitual attitude is not that of an interpreter; it is that of an artist who seeks the means of expression where they may be found.  He does not, like Goethe and Moerike, read out of the phenomena of nature and of life what these phenomena in themselves contain; he reads into them what he wishes them to say. The Book of Songs is a human document, but it is no document of the life of humanity; it is a collection of kaleidoscopic views of one life, a life not fortified by wholesome cooeperation with men nor nourished with the strength of nature, but vivifying nature with its own emotions.  Heine has treated many a situation with overwhelming pathos, but none from which he was himself so completely absent as Moerike from the kitchen of The Forsaken Maiden.  Goethe’s “Hush’d on the hill” is an apostrophe to himself; but peace which the world cannot give and cannot take away is the atmosphere of that poem; whereas Heine’s “The shades of the summer evening lie” gets its principal effectiveness from fantastic contributions of the poet’s own imagination.

The length to which Heine goes in attributing human emotions to nature is hardly to be paralleled before or since.  His aim not being the reproduction of reality, nor yet the objectivation of ideas, his poetry is essentially a poetry of tropes-that is, the conception and presentation of things not as they are but as they may be conceived to be.  A simple illustration of this method may be seen in The Herd-Boy.  Uhland wrote a poem on a very similar subject, The Boy’s Mountain Song.  But the contrast between Uhland’s hardy, active, public-spirited youth and Heine’s sleepy, amorous individualist is no more striking than the difference between Uhland’s rhetorical and Heine’s tropical method.  Heine’s poem is an elaboration of the single metaphor with which it begins: