maidens' tongues, the odd mountain flowers peep up at us as if with a thousand maidens' eyes, stretching out to us their curious, broad, drolly scalloped leaves; the sunrays flash here and there in sport, the herbs, as though endowed with reason, are telling one another their green legends, all seems enchanted"--in other words, a wonderland disturbed by no doubts on the part of a rationalistic Alice. And a further secret of this fascinating, though in the long run exasperating style, is the sublime audacity with which Heine dances now on one foot and now on the other, leaving you at every moment in amused perplexity, whether you shall next find him standing firmly on mother earth or bounding upward to recline on the clouds. "A mixture of description of nature, wit, poetry, and observation à la Washington Irving" Heine himself called the _Journey to the Hartz_. The novelty lay in the mixture, and in the fact that though the ingredients are, so to speak, potentized in the highest degree, they are brought to nearly perfect congruence and fusion by the irresistible solvent of the second named. The _Journey to the Hartz_ is a work of wit, in the present sense, and in the older sense of that word. It is a product of superior intelligence--not a _Sketch Book_, but a single canvas with an infinitude of details; not a _Sentimental Journey_--although Heine can outdo Sterne in sentimentality, he too persistently outdoes him also in satire--the work, fragmentary and outwardly formless, is in essence thoroughly informed by a two-fold purpose: to ridicule pedantry and philistinism, and to extol nature and the life of those uncorrupted by the world.