Then there are merry poems, treating of light characters like the girl whom he searches for through the whole town and finds in a fashionable hotel, and the girl in whose heart the blue hussars are quartered. And lastly, there are single epigrammatic verses, which every one now knows by heart, but which, at the time they appeared, gave great offence and made enemies for their author. Especially noteworthy is the famous: "Selten habt ihr mich verstanden, Selten auch verstand ich euch, Nur wenn wir im Koth uns fanden, So verstanden wir uns gleich."[15] [15] Little by thee comprehended, Little knew I thee, good brother; When we in the mud descended Soon we understood each other. (LELAND.) It is incomprehensible that this verse should ever have been regarded as a confession of unclean instincts. It only applies to those who find their way straight to any exceptionable or indecent passage in a book, as the sow finds her way to the mire, and stops there. That it never occurred to Heine that he was making any admission of having desired to appeal to his reader's sensual instincts or cynic tendencies is best proved by the poem which immediately follows on the lines in question, the one beginning: "Doch die Kastraten klagten, Als ich meine Stimm' erhob; Sie klagten und sie sagten: Ich sänge viel zu grob."[16] [16] How the eunuchs were complaining At the roughness of my song! Complaining and explaining That my voice was much too strong. (LELAND.) He could not have declared more unmistakably that, where he is straightforward, plain-spoken, or cynical, it is only the result of his modern tendency to realistic truthfulness, of his antipathy to romantic embellishment, and of his instinctive inclination to face the bitter truth of life. And there is quite as little justification for the general complaint of what Julian Schmidt has called the low-mindedness of Heine's sudden leaps from the sublime to the sordid. We have a typical instance of these sudden changes of style and mood in the poem _Frieden_ ("Peace"), one of the group of North Sea poems, in which Heine, during a calm at sea, beholds the giant form of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, striding over sea and land. He is clothed in white; his head touches the clouds; the heart in his breast is the sun, the red, flaming sun, and this sun-heart sheds its illuminating, warming rays over land and sea. Then there is a sudden revulsion of mood. Heine calls to mind a miserable, canting fellow in Berlin, weak in mind and body, strong in faith--what would not _he_ give to be able to hit upon such pious imagery, by means of which he might ingratiate himself with those in power and perhaps attain to the position of court-councillor in the pious town on the Spree--what dreams he would have of a hundred thalers rise in salary!