WHEN he came to writing songs, Heine was no longer a man driven,
no longer a helpless vehicle for figures, feelings, moods, visions that
he could not control. His conscious mind took charge and brought him
out of his emotional tumult into clearer waters. He instinctively fought
shy of his imagination and gave it a wide berth, without realizing that
it was his imagination that had given him the garden that was now his,
the garden of song. Here, by ancient tradition, the sun always shines,
the air is still, flowers grow, birds sing. All that was lacking was the
notice: dream-figures not admitted. While he avoided anything
imaginative and in doing so avoided his deepest poetic impulses, desire
and suffering and Weltschmerz lived on in his songs as if under protest.
For now sentimentality is ironized, and where a note of melancholy
sounds, a tender impertinence is superadded. When Heine strolled in
this garden, he felt as if he was lord and master of his verse, it seemed to
him that he could shape it as he chose. But it only seemed so. If we look
closely, we find that his songs too are not all on the surface. They too
have their deeps and their surprises.

Now that he was gradually finding a certain detachment from his
work, he began to benefit by the interest in formal and metrical
questions that Schlegel had awakened in him. In the winter of 1819--
the winter that preceded the writing of the tragedies--he had met
Schlegel in Bonn and been invited to visit him. He showed Schlegel
some of his verses and Schlegel encouraged him to publish them.
Heine reported enthusiastically to his friends that he could write very
gratifying things about his relation to Schlegel and that he was learning
and mastering the secrets of metre. 'Metre is very difficult', he said later
to Wedekind, a fellow student, but Schlegel, he added, had sometimes
by way of metre 'reached the poetic'. On Schlegel's advice he did much
correcting of old poems and wrote new ones. Among them, in all
probability, the cycle of sonnets, his only effort in this form, which

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