High above all poets of the time stood Heine. No German poet, except possibly Goethe, ever produced such a quantity of short poems which have become the property of every German child. The whole literature of lyric poetry can show only three or four men who can equal him in brief and direct expression. It was Heine who brought German literature down from the mountain tops and made it inhabit the homes of men. His poetry was no ‘mighty line,’ with inverted phrasings and high astounding polysyllables. He never spoke the speech of the gods, as did Schiller. He had no use for the paraphernalia of Greek mythology that had been popular in the _Sturm und Drang_ period. He spoke a German that easily fits into men’s mouths as they converse with their neighbors. Out of this he fashioned poetry. His syntax is as simple as that of the King James Bible (a rare thing in German literature). Each statement is a unit. And so with each of his thoughts and observations. Each comes to us in its simplest terms. Heine’s vocabulary (in his poems) is that of a child. His thoughts are those of any callow love-sick youth. His statement is so literal that it seems always to be on the verge of foolishness. He even seems careless in literary art; his lines are uneven, his rhymes the simplest imaginable, his rhythm disordered. Yet beneath and beyond this simplicity is the art of a careful workman, and the charm of a sensitive observer of men. Heine’s poems have the true lyric quality in that their real charm can never be finally analyzed. We can only say that beneath those childlike statements of the obvious was the genius of a poet.