locality. For Heine is capable of writing straightforward descriptive
prose, as well-ordered and as matter-of-fact as a narrative of
Kleist's. But the world of reality, where everything has an assignable
reason for its being and doing, is not the world into which he most
delights to conduct us. This world, on the contrary, is that in which
the water "murmurs and rustles so wonderfully, the birds pour forth
broken 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 à 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