Evidently, Heyse was neither a great dramatist nor a great poet; and although he was a man of unquestionable power, he reached forty years of age without having made any permanent impression on his time. But the good fortune which had attended his youth did not desert him in middle age. He lived amid congenial surroundings; wrote constantly and with increasing power; and gradually attained a self-knowledge which enabled him to recognize the true field for his exertions. He began writing novels in verse, then short stories in prose, and at length, in 1873, he wrote his great novel, "Children of the World." In this he expressed his philosophy of life. The man Heyse, with his intense admiration of physical beauty, his love of nature, his utter disregard of conventionality, his keen insight into the uttermost corners of human hearts, looks out of every page. The reader, whoever he may be, and however strongly he may disagree with much that he reads, is spellbound from first to last. The scenes between Edwin and Toinette in the first part of the book are as idyllic and unworldly as those between Marius and Cosette in "Les Miserables." Toinette herself, so exquisitely beautiful, so courageously true to her conception of her own nature, and so pitifully mistaken in that conception, fascinates us as she does Edwin, and excites our deepest compassion. Edwin, too, grave, and thoughtful, and warm-hearted as he is, seems no mere "character," but a living man. They are all children of the world, living entirely in the present without hope or desire for a future life. The existing world supplies them with all they ask. As Edwin says: "O beloved, a world in which we may attain such triumph over fate, over our own and that of those we love; in which the tragical is glorified by a gleam of the beautiful; in which intense joy of life sweeps through us, bringing softening tears, even as we shudder in the presence of death--such a world is not desolate." It is Heyse's own creed, this of the all-sufficiency of the present life. In one of his lyrics he has expressed it more explicitly--"Kein Ernst und Drüben, nur ein Jetzt und Hier!", and later on in the same poem he says: "Das eine wissen wir: Auch wir vergehen, und das ist Trotz genug." Since this was written at the time of his son's death, his disbelief in immortality must be at least sincere. Having now abandoned his aspirations towards poetic and dramatic fame, Heyse worked as his own nature dictated, and soon made for himself a distinctive place in German literature. In 1876, his other long novel, "In Paradise," a story of artist life in Munich, appeared. Unlike "Children of the World," "In Paradise" is full of humor and has little philosophy.