But in contrast to those just mentioned the greater number of his poems are of a subjective kind. Again the poet writes of his wife, from whom after all comes every joy that he experiences away from home, and he only draws her all the closer to his heart since the passing years have imprinted the first signs of age on her gentle features. His love is mixed with yearning for the time when they were both young and--for his home. The yearning for home is at one time expressed in almost classically pure words, "nach drüben ist sein Auge stets gewandt" (his eye is ever roaming toward the other land); at another it merely underlies and glimmers through the devotion with which he paints a scene from home; at still another the poet's blood surges high and "fury and longing for home wrestle for his heart." At last he can no longer stifle his indignation; he calls upon the very dead to arise and to battle again, and in ringing words shouts to the world "_die deutschen Gräber sind ein Spott der Feinde_" (the German graves are mocked by enemies). Even more strongly than in his political poems the specifically manly quality in Storm's poetry appears in what we may call his confessional lyrics. There he gives us his thoughts about immortality: that, in common with all creation, man too rebels against dissolution, and that the belief in immortality is only the final, refined, and spiritualized form of this rebellion. But the true man stands above his own fate and will not sacrifice reason even to the most seductive promises. The church stands opposed to such high development of the individual; Storm thinks poorly of it, and forbids the priest to attend at his grave. [Illustration: THEODOR STORM _Permission Berlin Photo. Co., New York_] As in the realm of the mind the poet opposes the church, so in the social sphere he attacks feudalism and the bureaucracy. Those whose national feeling is not deep and comprehensive enough to allow them to feel at one with the people he stigmatizes as the drop of poison in German blood. He holds up to ridicule those who need the pretentiousness of power in order to be happy and would like to gain it at the cost of the people's liberty. But in pithy words Storm advises his sons to keep to the truth uncompromisingly, to despise outward success, but to spare no pains in striving for true worth, not to sacrifice self-respect to consideration for others but always to remember that in this life, after all, every one can stand only on his own feet.