Take, for example, the poem in which Heine describes himself as the ill-fated Atlas; condemned to bear the whole world of suffering: "Du stolzes Herz, du hast es ja gewollt, Du wolltest glücklich sein, unendlich glücklich, Oder unendlich elend, stolzes Herz! Und jetzo bist du elend."[5] [5] Proud heart, 'twas thine own choice, Thou chosest to be happy, infinitely happy, Or infinitely miserable, proud heart! And now thou art miserable. These are lines one does not forget. But the exclamation of the first line, which expresses a perilous extreme of self-reliance, becomes self-complacency when Heine's stanza is placed alongside of Goethe's simple and grand "Alles geben die Götter, die Unendlichen, Ihren Lieblingen ganz: Alle Freuden, die unendlichen, Alle Schmerzen, die unendlichen, Ganz."[6] [6] What the eternal Gods, give to their favourites, they give without alloy-infinite joy, infinite sorrow--without alloy. It would be most unreasonable to blame Heine because he employs other and more violent methods than Goethe does--to say, for instance, of a poem like _Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen_ ("A young man loves a maiden"), that Goethe would have shrunk from the grotesqueness of the bitter, desperate ending: "Und wem sie just passieret, Dem bricht das Herz entzwei" (And he to whom it happens, It breaks his heart in two). It would have been abhorrent to him for much the same reason that it would have been abhorrent to an old Greek. What is simply new, simply _modern_ in the feeling, is justifiable. Even the grotesqueness is in this case artistically led up to. But at times the grotesque grimace is all that is left of the modern element. Take that famous poem: _Mein Herz, mein Herz ist traurig_ ("My heart, my heart is heavy"). It contains an admirable description of a wide landscape, viewed from the height of the old bastion. We see the blue town moat, with a boy fishing from a boat, and away on the other side of the moat, small and clear, we see summer-houses and gardens, men and oxen, meadows and woods, girls bleaching clothes, a turning mill-wheel sending out diamond dust, and at the foot of the old grey tower a sentry-box, with the sentry walking up and down, his gun flashing in the sunlight. H. C. Andersen, writing of this poem, remarks, "And the end is so _affecting_: 'Ich wollt', er schösse mich todt'" (I wish he would shoot me dead). Affecting? No. Startling; for nothing has prepared us for it. The ejaculation is possibly not entirely insincere; but it is so nervous that it is practically meaningless; it is in so far untruthful, that these big words only express a momentary mood, not a serious, determined desire. Goethe has expressed, if not longing for death, at least reconciliation to the idea of death, in the famous, immortal lines: