document of the life of humanity; it is a collection of kaleidoscopic
views of one life, a life not fortified by wholesome coöperation with
men nor nourished with the strength of nature, but vivifying nature
with its own emotions. Heine has treated many a situation with
overwhelming pathos, but none from which he was himself so completely
absent as Mörike from the kitchen of The _Forsaken Maiden_. Goethe's
"Hush'd on the hill" is an apostrophe to himself; but peace which the
world cannot give and cannot take away is the atmosphere of that poem;
whereas Heine's "The shades of the summer evening lie" gets its
principal effectiveness from fantastic contributions of the poet's own
imagination.

The length to which Heine goes in attributing human emotions to nature
is hardly to be paralleled before or since. His aim not being the
reproduction of reality, nor yet the objectivation of ideas, his
poetry is essentially a poetry of tropes-that is, the conception and
presentation of things not as they are but as they 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--