His best writings lie on the further side of the ten commandments, middle class decorum and the penal code. They are included in the mysterious province of instinct and impulse, and are sometimes so dreamy that one sees that they are the production of the writer’s intuitive nerves rather than the result of serious thinking. It is this that distinguishes Heyse from the German authors of our day, and because his intuition is so fine, his susceptibility so delicately toned, he is one of the greatest diviners in the province of spiritualised sexuality that has ever been, or now is. And because he was always an intuitive physiologist, he was also a convinced fatalist. He, with his poet’s soul, had gazed beyond the accepted standard of good and evil long before Nietzsche, he had recognised the present type of emancipated womanhood long before the Woman’s Rights movement was in full swing. It was this delicate sensibility which put him in touch with every secret movement before it had gained ground and become universal, and it is because he possessed this fine susceptibility of the nerves that he became acknowledged as the only one among German authors who knew how to write about love. Outside the birds are twittering, the torrent roars and the wind of early spring moans around the house, bringing a longing with it, a vague, restless longing for freedom and happiness, a longing to lose one’s self and to live one’s own life to a degree that is not possible on earth, a longing to shake off everything that holds one down and to be united to the Infinite.... It is the yearning of first youth, which returns again with passionate tears in last youth ... it is the yearning peculiar to Heyse, the longing of the awakened child-girl and the sorrowful desire of the matured woman, these are the two types of womanhood which he has divined as no one else has done, these are the two passionate ages, the beginning and the end, between which lies the much-trodden, phlegmatic middle path. Woman is a revelation only in her youth and in her age, in her first blossoming and in the years when she begins to fade; all that lies between is merely education, common sense, discretion and that luke-warm temperament in which the majority of bourgeois marriages are contracted. II