love-sick strains, the trees whisper as if with a thousand maidens’ tongues, the odd mountain flowers peep up at us as if with a thousand maidens’ eyes, stretching out to us their curious, broad, drolly scalloped leaves; the sunrays flash here and there in sport, the herbs, as though endowed with reason, are telling one another their green legends, all seems enchanted”—­in other words, a wonderland disturbed by no doubts on the part of a rationalistic Alice.  And a further secret of this fascinating, though in the long run exasperating style, is the sublime audacity with which Heine dances now on one foot and now on the other, leaving you at every moment in amused perplexity, whether you shall next find him standing firmly on mother earth or bounding upward to recline on the clouds.

“A mixture of description of nature, wit, poetry, and observation a la Washington Irving” Heine himself called the Journey to the Hartz.  The novelty lay in the mixture, and in the fact that though the ingredients are, so to speak, potentized in the highest degree, they are brought to nearly perfect congruence and fusion by the irresistible solvent of the second named.  The Journey to the Hartz is a work of wit, in the present sense, and in the older sense of that word.  It is a product of superior intelligence—­not a Sketch Book, but a single canvas with an infinitude of details; not a Sentimental Journey—­although Heine can outdo Sterne in sentimentality, he too persistently outdoes him also in satire—­the work, fragmentary and outwardly formless, is in essence thoroughly informed by a two-fold purpose:  to ridicule pedantry and philistinism, and to extol nature and the life of those uncorrupted by the world.

A similar unity is unmistakable in the Book of Songs.  It would be difficult to find another volume of poems so cunningly composed.  If we examine the book in its most obvious aspect, we find it beginning with Youthful Sorrows and ending with hymns to the North Sea; passing, that is to say, from the most subjective to the most objective of Heine’s poetic expressions.  The first of the Youthful Sorrows are Dream Pictures, crude and grotesque imitations of an inferior romantic genre; the North Sea Pictures are magnificent attempts in highly original form to catch the elusive moods of a great natural element which before Heine had played but little part in German poetry.  From the Dream Pictures we proceed to Songs (a very simple love story told in forms as nearly conventional as Heine ever used), to Romances which, with the notable exception of The Two Grenadiers and Belshazzar, are relatively feeble attempts at the objectivation of personal suffering; and thence to Sonnets, direct communications to particular persons.  Thereupon follow the Lyrical Intermezzo and the Return Home, each with a prologue and an epilogue, and with several series of pieces which,