Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at the early age of thirty-one--Wilhelm Müller, the author of the _Müllerlieder_, particularly well known from Schubert's musical setting, and of the _Griechenlieder_, which were equally admired in their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, _Deutsche Liebe_, the story of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life. On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song, and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses; "but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are those of conventional society." It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses alongside of Müller's. Müller writes: "Wir sassen so traulich beisammen Im kühlen Erlendach, Wir schauten so traulich zusammen Hinab in den rieselnden Bach." And Heine: "Wir sassen am Fischerhause Und schauten nach der See, Die Abendnebel kamen Und stiegen in die Höh'." How closely this last stanza resembles such a stanza of Müller's as: "Die Abendnebel sinken Hernieder kalt und schwer, Und Todesengel schweben In ihren Dampf umher."[2] [2] Wilhelm Müller: _Gedichte_, i. p. 26; "Thränenregen," p. 194; "Dasselbe noch einmal." These are the introductory lines of a long, beautiful poem called _Hirtenbiwouak in der römischen Campagna_, the most important part of which is the shepherd's song of longing for his sweetheart. How much Heine must have learned from such a verse as that which describes the young girl: "Darunter sitzt ein Mädchen, Die Spindel in der Hand, Und spinnt und sinnt und schauet Herab in's eb'ne Land."