“Kingly is the herd-boy’s calling.”  The poem Pine and Palm, in which Heine expresses his hopeless separation from the maiden of whom he dreams—­incidentally attributing to Amalie a feeling of sadness and solitude to which she was a stranger—­is a bolder example of romantic self-projection into nature.  But not the boldest that Heine offers us.  He transports us to India, and there—­

  The violets titter, caressing,
    Peeping up as the planets appear,
  And the roses, their warm love confessing,
    Whisper words, soft perfumed, to each ear.

Nor does he allow us to question the occurrence of these marvels; how do we know what takes place on the banks of the Ganges, whither we are borne on the wings of song?  This, indeed, would be Heine’s answer to any criticism based upon Ruskin’s notion as to the “pathetic fallacy.”  If the setting is such as to induce in us the proper mood, we readily enter the non-rational realm, and with credulous delight contemplate wonders such as we too have seen in our dreams; just as we find the romantic syntheses of sound and odor, or of sound and color, legitimate attempts to express the inexpressible.  The atmosphere of prose, to be sure, is less favorable to Heine’s habitual indulgence in romantic tropes.

Somewhat blunted by over-employment is another romantic instrument, eminently characteristic of Heine, namely, irony.  Nothing could be more trenchant than his bland assumption of the point of view of the Jew-baiter, the hypocrite, or the slave-trader.  It is as perfect as his adoption of childlike faith in The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar.  Many a time he attains an effect of ironical contrast by the juxtaposition of incongruous poems, as when a deification of his beloved is followed by a cynical utterance of a different kind of love.  But often the incongruity is within the poem itself, and the poet, destroying the illusion of his created image, gets a melancholy satisfaction from derision of his own grief.  This procedure perfectly symbolizes a distracted mind; it undoubtedly suggests a superior point of view, from which the tribulations of an insignificant individual are seen to be insignificant; but in a larger sense it symbolizes the very instability and waywardness of Heine himself.  His emotions were unquestionably deep and recurrent, but they were not constant.  His devotion to ideals did not preclude indulgence in very unideal pleasures; and his love of Amalie and Therese, hopeless from the beginning, could not, except in especially fortunate moments, avoid erring in the direction either of sentimentality or of bitterness.  But Heine was too keenly intellectual to be indulgent of sentimentality, and too caustic to restrain bitterness.  Hence the bitter-sweet of many of his pieces, so agreeably stimulating and so suggestive of an elastic temperament.