The time of Heine's entrance in the field of literature was no unfavorable one for an individual genius like his own. The so-called Classic and Romantic schools of Germany had each in its own direction reached the ultimate limits of its development. Schiller was dead, Goethe was at work upon the second part of _Faust_ and the _Westöstliche Divan_, while such of the Romantic writers as were left had penetrated far into the realms of mediæval mysticism to bring to the light only wild and distorted forms of imagery and the most extravagant creations of morbid fancy. In Heine, who could sing of love and moonlight and nightingales with the best of them, they thought they had found a new champion to revive their now declining glory, little dreaming that ten years later, in his famous essay on the Romantic school, he was destined to deal their cause its deathblow and disperse for ever the lingering mists and spectres of German Romanticism. Nevertheless, all Heine's earlier writings, prose as well as verse, show very clearly the influence of the school. "I am tired of this guerrilla warfare," he writes in 1830, "and long for rest. What an irony of fate, that I, who would rest so gladly on the pillow of a quiet, contemplative inner life--that I should be destined to scourge my poor fellow-countrymen from their comfortable existence and stir them into activity--I, who like best to watch the passing clouds, to invent (_erklügeln_) metrical magic, to hearken to the secrets of the spirits of the elements and absorb myself in the wonder-world of old tales,--I must edit political annals, preach the topics of the time, stir up the passions!" A little later comes the news of the Revolution in Paris, and all these vague romantic longings have vanished into air, melted away by the beams of the July sun.