"Der schlimmste Wurm: des Zweifels Dolchgedanken,
Das schlimmste Gift: an eigner Kraft verzagen,
Das wollt' mir fast des Lebens Mark zernagen;
Ich war ein Reis, dem seine Stützen sanken.
Da mochtest du das arme Reis beklagen,
An deinem güt'gen Wort lässt du es ranken,
Und dir, mein hoher Meister, soll ich's danken,
Wird einst das schwache Reislein Blüthen tragen," &c.[1]
[1] The most dangerous worm—doubt, with its dagger tooth; the most deadly poison—distrust of one's own powers, were eating away my life; I was a sapling bereft of its supports.
Thou hadst pity on the poor sapling, thou gavest it the support of encouraging word; if ever the weak sapling blossoms, thine, great master, be the praise.
It is under this first Romantic influence that Heine writes his earliest, purely Romantic poems in archaistic style, verses like:
"Die du bist so schön und rein,
Wunnevolles Magedein,
Deinem Dienste ganz allein
Möcht' ich wohl mein Leben weihn.
Deine süssen Aeugelein
Glänzen mild wie Mondenschein,
Helle Rosenlichter streun
Deine rothen Wängelein."
This reminds us forcibly of Tieck's earliest verses, those introduced into his tales. In the one little poem from which these stanzas are taken, we come upon Wunne, Magedein, Aeugelein, Wängelein, Mündchen, weiland, a whole string of diminutives and archaisms.
Heine's next model was a genial, true poet, who died in 1827, at the early age of thirty-one—Wilhelm Müller, the author of the Müllerlieder, particularly well known from Schubert's musical setting, and of the Griechenlieder, which were equally admired in their day. A son of Wilhelm Müller's is the well-known German-English philologist, Max Müller, whose novel, Deutsche Liebe, the story of the tender love of a young German savant for a sickly, bedridden princess, is said to be based on events in his father's life.
On the 7th of June 1826, Heine writes to Müller: "I am magnanimous enough to confess frankly that the resemblance of my little Intermezzo metre [the one most frequently employed by Heine] to your usual metre is not purely accidental; the secret of its cadence was in all probability learned from your verses." He goes on to explain that he had early felt the influence of the German popular ballad and song, and that at Bonn, Schlegel had initiated him into the art of verses; "but," he adds, "it is in your verse that I seem for the first time to have found the clear ring, the true simplicity, which I have always aimed at. How clear, how simple your poems are, and they are one and all popular poems. In mine only the form is popular; the ideas are those of conventional society."
It was from Müller that Heine first learned how to evolve new popular forms out of the old. To behold as it were with our own eyes the birth and growth of Heine's style, we only need to set certain of his verses alongside of Müller's.
Müller writes: