A similar unity is unmistakable in the _Book of Songs_. It would be difficult to find another volume of poems so cunningly composed. If we examine the book in its most obvious aspect, we find it beginning with _Youthful Sorrows_ and ending with hymns to the North Sea; passing, that is to say, from the most subjective to the most objective of Heine's poetic expressions. The first of the _Youthful Sorrows_ are _Dream Pictures_, crude and grotesque imitations of an inferior romantic _genre_; the _North Sea Pictures_ are magnificent attempts in highly original form to catch the elusive moods of a great natural element which before Heine had played but little part in German poetry. From the _Dream Pictures_ we proceed to _Songs_ (a very simple love story told in forms as nearly conventional as Heine ever used), to _Romances_ which, with the notable exception of _The Two Grenadiers_ and _Belshazzar_, are relatively feeble attempts at the objectivation of personal suffering; and thence to _Sonnets_, direct communications to particular persons. Thereupon follow the _Lyrical Intermezzo_ and the _Return Home_, each with a prologue and an epilogue, and with several series of pieces which, like the _Songs_ above mentioned, are printed without titles and are successive sentences or paragraphs in the poet's own love story. This he tells over and over again, without monotony, because the story gains in significance as the lover gains in experience, because each time he finds for it a new set of symbols, and because the symbols become more and more objective as the poet's horizon broadens. Then come a few pieces of religious content (culminating in _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_), the poems in the _Journey to the Hartz_ (the most striking of which are animated by the poetry of folk-lore)--these poems clearly transitional to the poetry of the ocean which Heine wrote with such vigor in the two cycles on the North Sea. The movement is a steady climax. The truth of the foregoing observations can be tested only by an examination of the entire _Book of Songs_. The total effect is one of arrangement. The order of the sections is chronological; the order of the poems within the sections is logical; and some poems were altered to make them fit into the scheme. Each was originally the expression of a moment; and the peculiarity of Heine as a lyric poet is his disposition to fix a moment, however fleeting, and to utter a feeling, of however slight consequence to humanity it might at first blush seem to be. In the _Journey to the Hartz_ he never lost an opportunity to make a point; in his lyrical confessions he suppressed no impulse to self-revelation; and seldom did his mastery of form fail to ennoble even the meanest substance.