HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
that helped him to float through ether. Song seemed
as natural to him as to the thrush and the nightingale:
"Heine's Book of Songs, like Tennyson's In Memoriam,
draws its inspiration from a single theme.
But the English poet, while adhering to the same
poetic form, and revolving round the same central
emotion, takes a wide sweep of thought — the German
poet, on the contrary, keeps within a narrow
circle of ideas and feelings, but perpetually varies
his poetic form. Unhappy love is the almost unvarying
theme of the Book of Songs; but we have
read them seriatim, again and again, without any
disagreeable sense of monotony — so ever changing,
ever charming, are the melodies of Heine's
verse, so inexhaustibly diversified are the modes in
which his imagination presents the same feeling.
He gives it us in eerie dreams, in ballads, in idyls,
in sonnets, and most of all in delicious little lyrics,
which he seems to find as easy as sighing; and everywhere
there is the same wonderful grace — everywhere
there is that completeness of expression without
eflFort, which reminds us of nothing so much
as of the rapid revelations of feeling which may
be read in the beautiful and expressive human
face." ''
When Edgar Alfred Bowring followed up his
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