Not only was Heine a Jew in his instinctive racial sympathies, but his work bears the indelible impress of Judaism. It is a distinctively Jewish product. In it appear the buoyancy of spirit which sustained him under suffering that would have crushed a less resilient temper; the intellectual arrogance; the proneness to censure rather than to commend; and especially the excessive self-consciousness;--all these distinctively Jewish traits were in him exaggerated and helped to make his work what it was. It is his self-consciousness, in particular, that made his _Buch der Lieder_ his best production. In that remarkable collection of lyrics Heine appears at his best, because the ability to compose songs that are the spontaneous utterance of emotion, at one and the same time personal and representative, is a Hebrew heritage. The Hebrew genius was essentially lyric, rather than epic or dramatic; and in consequence, the lyrics of ancient Hebrew literature are its chief glory. In proof of this, we have but to recall the dirges and triumph songs, the reflective lyrics, and the liturgical hymns that compose the collection we know as the Psalms. The excellence of both the old Hebrew lyrics and of Heine's Lieder is to be found in the extraordinary subjectivity of the Hebrew temper--the racial fondness for impassioned, yet artistic, self-expression. Yet Heine's Jewish traits are evident not only in the subjectivity of his lyrics, but in the new and richer character that he gave to the German Lied. This, hitherto vague and dreamy, became in his hands startlingly concrete and definite. And this is true even when he expresses the most subtle feelings. Always the most evanescent _Stimmung_, not less than moods more primitively simple, find expression in metaphors so sensuously material as to recall Solomon's Song. Compare a typical lyric of Heine, such as the following: Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, die Sonne Die liebt' ich alle in Liebeswonne, Ich lieb' sie nicht mehr, ich liebe allein Die Kleine, die Feine, die Reine, die Eine; Sie selber, aller Liebe Bronne, Ist Rose und Lilie und Taube und Sonne with the love lyric sung by one of Israel's nameless singers: Behold thou art fair, my love; Behold thou art fair; Thine eyes are as doves. Behold thou art fair, my beloved Yea, thou art pleasant: And our couch is green. The beams of our house are cedars, And our rafters are firs. I am a rose of Sharon, A lily of the valleys. As a lily among thorns, So is my love among the daughters.[C] Even so brief a comparison may illustrate, though it may not prove, that for the ultimate source of Heine's Oriental exuberance and materialization, so new to German literature, we must look in Jewish not in European culture. _The Spiritual Depth of Heine_