son of his old friend, Wilhelm Müller, he was pleased. To me it was like a vision of a bygone age when I looked the old poet in the eyes, and whenever I hear his song, “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein,” or when I read his beautiful ballads, I see the silent poet looking at me with his kind eyes, unable to use meaningless words, but simply saying “Thank you.” Another poet who was a friend and admirer of my father, and whom I saw likewise like a vision only passing before me, was Heinrich Heine. He was younger than my father (1799–1856), and evidently looked up to him as his master. “I love no lyric poet,” he wrote, “excepting Goethe, so much as Wilhelm Müller.” I found a letter of his which deserves to be preserved. Alas! the whole of my father’s library and correspondence was destroyed by fire, and this letter escaped only because my mother, a great admirer of Heine’s poems, had preserved it among her own books. Here is the letter, or at least parts of it. The original was sent about the years 1841–43, when I was a student at Leipzig, to Brockhaus’ _Blätter für Litterarische Unterhaltung_, but the original was never returned to me. It has often been quoted in histories of German literature, and I give the extracts here from Gustav Karpeles’ “Heinrich Heine’s Autobiographie,” Berlin, 1888, pp. 149, 150:— Hamburg, 7th June, 1826. I am great enough to confess to you openly that my Small Intermezzo metre[5] possesses not merely accidental similarity with your own accustomed metre, but probably owes its most secret rhythm to your songs—those dear Müller-songs which I came to know at the very time when I wrote the Intermezzo. At a very early time I let German folk-song exercise its influence upon me. Later on, when I studied at Bonn, August Schlegel opened many metrical secrets to me; but I believe it was in your songs that I found what I looked for—pure tone and true simplicity. How pure and clear your songs are, and they are all true folk-songs. In my poems, on the contrary, the form only is to a certain extent popular, the thoughts belong to our conventional society. Yes, I am great enough to repeat it distinctly, and you will sooner or later find it proclaimed publicly, that through the study of your seventy-seven poems it became clear to me for the first time how from the forms of our old still existing folk-songs new forms may be deduced which are quite as popular, though one need not imitate the unevennesses and awkwardnesses of the old language. In the second volume of your poems the form seemed to me even purer and more transparently clear. But why say so much about the form? What I yearn to tell you is that, with the exception of Goethe, there is no lyric poet whom I love as much as you. Another fragment of the same letter occurs on page 195 (951). Here Heine, referring to his North Sea poems, writes:—