These tendencies may have first roused the determined hostility with which the followers of Goethe greeted the new poet and indignantly repelled the claims of his friends for his succession to Goethe's lyric muse. There was, at all events no love lost between the great Goethe himself and his younger contemporary. Goethe simply ignored Heine, and the latter, though he could not reciprocate in this way, did not spare his mighty rival certain home-thrusts on his most vulnerable side. He made a pilgrimage to Weimar in 1824 on his return from the famous Harz journey, but he is exceedingly reticent on the subject, and the following humorous account from the _Romantische Schule_ is almost the only one to be had of the visit. "His form," he writes, "was harmonious, clear, joyous, nobly-proportioned, and Greek art could be studied in him as in an antique: his eyes were at rest like those of a god. It is generally the distinguishing mark of the gods that their gaze is steadfast, and their eyes do not wander in uncertainty hither and thither. Napoleon's eyes had this peculiarity also, and therefore I am convinced that he was a god. Goethe's eyes were as divine in his advanced age as in his youth. Time had covered his head with snow, but it could not bend it. He bore it ever proud and high, and when he reached forth his hand, it was as if he would prescribe to the stars their course in the heavens. There are those who profess to have observed the cold lines of egotism about his mouth, but these lines belong also to the immortal gods, and above all to the Father of the gods, the great Jupiter, with whom I have already compared Goethe. In truth, when I visited him in Weimar and stood before him, I glanced involuntarily aside to see if the eagle and the thunderbolts were at hand. I came very near addressing him in Greek, but when I noticed that he understood German I told him in German that the plums on the road between Weimar and Jena tasted very good. I had pondered in so many long winter nights over all the lofty and profound things I should say to Goethe if I should ever see him, and when at last I saw him I told him that the Saxon plums tasted very good; and Goethe smiled with the same lips that had once kissed the fair Leda, Europa, Danäe, Semele, and so many other princesses or even ordinary nymphs."--"My soul is shaken," he cries elsewhere, "and my eye burns, and that is an unfavorable condition for a writer, who should control his material and remain beautifully objective (_hübsch objektiv bleiben soll_), as the Art School requires and as Goethe has done. He has become eighty years old by it," he adds with incomparable irony, "and minister, and well-to-do (_wohlhabend_). Poor German people! this is thy greatest man!" To all this there is a keenly personal edge, but the real gulf between the two lies deeper than wounded vanity on the one side and possible jealousy on the other, and is as wide and impassable as