With these words Heine sent forth his “Sonettenkranz” to A.W. von Schlegel in 1821.[192] These sonnets show what a deep impression the personality and lectures of the famous romanticist made on him while he was a student at Bonn, in 1819 and 1820.  Schlegel had just then been appointed to the professorship of Literature at the newly created university, and to his lectures Heine owed the interest for India which manifests itself in many of his poems, and which continued even in later years when his relations to his former teacher had undergone a complete change.

He never undertook the study of Sanskrit.  His interest in India was purely poetic.  “Aber ich stamme aus Hindostan, und daher fuehle ich mich so wohl in den breiten Sangeswaeldern Valmikis, die Heldenlieder des goettlichen Ramo bewegen mein Herz wie ein bekanntes Weh, aus den Blumenliedern Kalidasas bluehen mir hervor die suessesten Erinnerungen” (Ideen, vol. v. p. 115)—­these words, with some allowance perhaps for the manner of the satirist, may well be taken to characterize the poet’s attitude towards India.  Instinctively he appropriated to himself the most beautiful characteristics of Sanskrit poetry, its tender love for the objects of nature, for flowers and animals and the similes and metaphors inspired thereby, and he invests them with all the grace and charm peculiar to his muse.  Some of his finest verses owe their inspiration to the lotus; and in that famous poem “Die Lotosblume aengstigt,”—­so beautifully set to music by Schumann—­the favorite flower of India’s poets may be said to have found its aesthetic apotheosis.  As is well known, there are two kinds of lotuses, the one opening its leaves to the sun (Skt. padma, pankaja), the other to the moon (Skt. kumuda, kairava).  Both kinds are mentioned in Sakuntala (Act.  V. Sc. 4, ed.  Kale, Bombay, 1898, p. 141):  kumudanyeva sasankah savita bhodhayati pankajanyeva “the moon wakes only the night lotuses, the sun only the day lotuses."[193] It is the former kind, the nymphaea esculenta, of which Heine sings, and his conception of the moon as its lover is distinctively Indic and constantly recurring in Sanskrit literature.  Thus at the beginning of the first book of the Hitopadesa the moon is called the lordly bridegroom of the lotuses.[194]

The splendor of an Indic landscape haunts the imagination of the poet.  On the wings of song he will carry his love to the banks of the Ganges (vol. i. p. 98), to that moonlit garden where the lotus-flowers await their sister, where the violets peep at the stars, the roses whisper their perfumed tales into each other’s ears and the gazelles listen, while the waves of the sacred river make sweet music.  And again in a series of sonnets addressed to Friederike (Neue Ged. vol. ii. p. 65) he invites her to come with him to India, to its palm-trees, its ambra-blossoms and lotus-flowers, to see the gazelles leaping on the banks of the Ganges, and the peacocks displaying their gaudy plumage, to hear Kokila singing his impassioned lay.  He sees Kama in the features of his beloved, and Vasanta hovering on her lips; her smile moves the Gandharvas in their golden, sunny halls to song.