hey 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: "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