" After 1831, his hopes of soon upsetting the German
Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more
truly literary, character.
It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to
literature. To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life
filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the
great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed
the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a
wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares
most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany,--
so wide, so impartial, that it is apt to become slack and powerless, and
to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round
which to group all its other ideas. So the mystic and romantic school of
Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their
influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them. Heine, with
a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle
Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim,[152] Heine the chief romantic
poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet: he is a
great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a
talisman by which he can feel--along with but above the power of the
fascinating Middle Age itself--the power of modern ideas.
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