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.

There is, however, a still more pervasive incongruity between this
temperament and the forms in which it expressed itself. Heine's love
poems--two-thirds of the _Book of Songs_--are written in the very
simplest of verses, mostly quatrains of easy and seemingly inevitable
structure. Heine learned the art of making them from the _Magic Horn_,
from Uhland, and from Eichendorff, and he carried the art to the
highest pitch of virtuosity. They are the forms of the German
Folk-song, a fit vehicle for homely sentiments and those elemental
passions which come and go like the tide in a humble heart, because
the humble heart is single and yields unresistingly to their flow. But
Heine's heart was not single, his passion was complex, and the
greatest of his ironies was his use of the most unsophisticated of
forms for his most sophisticated substances. This, indeed, was what
made his love poetry so novel and so piquant to his contemporaries;
this is one of the qualities that keep it alive today; but it is a
highly individual device which succeeded only with this individual;
and that it was a device adopted from no lack of capacity in other
measures appears from the perfection of Heine's sonnets and the
incomparable free rhythmic verses of the _North Sea_ cycles.

Taken all in all, _The Book of Songs_ was a unique collection, making
much of little, and making it with an amazing economy of means.

III

Heine's first period, to 1831, when he was primarily a literary
artist, nearly coincides with the epoch of the Restoration
(1815-1830). Politically, this time was unproductive in Germany, and
the very considerable activi