Toward the outside world, then, Heine's habitual attitude is not that of an interpreter; it is that of an artist who seeks the means of expression where they may be found. He does not, like Goethe and Mörike, read out of the phenomena of nature and of life what these phenomena in themselves contain; he reads into them what he wishes them to say. _The Book of Songs_ is a human document, but it is no document of the life of humanity; it is a collection of kaleidoscopic views of one life, a life not fortified by wholesome coöperation with men nor nourished with the strength of nature, but vivifying nature with its own emotions. Heine has treated many a situation with overwhelming pathos, but none from which he was himself so completely absent as Mörike from the kitchen of The _Forsaken Maiden_. Goethe's "Hush'd on the hill" is an apostrophe to himself; but peace which the world cannot give and cannot take away is the atmosphere of that poem; whereas Heine's "The shades of the summer evening lie" gets its principal effectiveness from fantastic contributions of the poet's own imagination. The length to which Heine goes in attributing human emotions to nature is hardly to be paralleled before or since. His aim not being the reproduction of reality, nor yet the objectivation of ideas, his poetry is essentially a poetry of tropes-that is, the conception and presentation of things not as they are but as they may be conceived to be. A simple illustration of this method may be seen in _The Herd-Boy_. Uhland wrote a poem on a very similar subject, _The Boy's Mountain Song_. But the contrast between Uhland's hardy, active, public-spirited youth and Heine's sleepy, amorous individualist is no more striking than the difference between Uhland's rhetorical and Heine's tropical method. Heine's poem is an elaboration of the single metaphor with which it begins: "Kingly is the herd-boy's calling." The poem _Pine and Palm_, in which Heine expresses his hopeless separation from the maiden of whom he dreams--incidentally attributing to Amalie a feeling of sadness and solitude to which she was a stranger--is a bolder example of romantic self-projection into nature. But not the boldest that Heine offers us. He transports us to India, and there-- The violets titter, caressing, Peeping up as the planets appear, And the roses, their warm love confessing, Whisper words, soft perfumed, to each ear.