It is very characteristic of the two poets that (as has already been noted), whenever the representation of love-longing glides into a delineation of foreign lands, Goethe prefers to paint Italy, Heine Hindostan. In Mignon's song of longing, without a superlative or a diminutive, with a power like that of a God, Goethe summons before our eyes the picture of the classic land where the citrons bloom. There is a power in it all, a force in each distinguishing trait, that Heine does not attain to. But compare this with the bewitching sweetness of Heine's Auf Flügeln des Gesanges ("Oh, I would bear thee, my love, my bride, afar on the wings of song"), the dreamy longing, the charm and the mystery of the perspective that opens out to us:
"Es hüpfen herbei und lauschen
Die frommen, klugen Gazelln,
Und in der Ferne rauschen
Des heiligen Stromes Welln."[20]
[20] Gazelles come bounding from the brake,
And pause, and look shyly round;
And the waves of the sacred river make
A far-off slumb'rous sound.
(Sir THEODORE MARTIN)
This is an immortal stanza. Goethe, even when he gives the reins to longing, is always, like his own goldsmith of Ephesus, the great, wise heathen, who makes images of the gods; in Heine's visionary brain there was that particle of divine frenzy without which it had been impossible for the Düsseldorf merchant's son to understand and reproduce the fatalistic, self-effacing dreaminess of ancient India.
Heine's peculiarities of style stand out even more sharply against the background of Goethe's, when we compare the way in which the two give expression to what is not exactly desire, but the pure longing of love.
Think of the following lines, which Goethe puts into Mignon's mouth:
"Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide,
Allein und abgetrennt von aller Freude,
Seh' ich an's Firmament nach jener Seite.
Ach, der mich liebt und kennt, ist in der Weite.—
Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide.
Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, weiss was ich leide."[21]
[21] My grief no mortals know, except the yearning!
Alone, a prey to woe, all pleasure spurning,
Up towards the sky I throw a gaze discerning.
He who my love doth know seems ne'er returning;
With strange and fiery glow my heart is burning[*]
My grief no mortals know, except the yearning.
(BOWRING)
[*]In the original, my bowels are burning.
This is the master in the fulness of his power. Much art has been expended in the representation of the wearing monotony of longing—the five doubly rhyming lines, the languishing metre—interrupted by the audacious, realistic expression: "Es schwindelt mir, es brennt mein Eingeweide." Now compare with this, one of Heine's most perfect expressions of pure love-longing, and we shall see what the plastic fancy and the perfected laconicism of style which we traced in course of development have succeeded in producing for time and eternity: