with the love lyric sung by one of Israel's nameless singers:

Behold thou art fair, my love;
Behold thou art fair;
Thine eyes are as doves.
Behold thou art fair, my beloved
Yea, thou art pleasant:
And our couch is green.
The beams of our house are cedars,
And our rafters are firs.
I am a rose of Sharon,
A lily of the valleys.
As a lily among thorns,
So is my love among the daughters.[C]

Even so brief a comparison may illustrate, though it may not prove, that for the ultimate source of Heine's Oriental exuberance and materialization, so new to German literature, we must look in Jewish not in European culture.

The Spiritual Depth of Heine

PERHAPS because Heine was in spirit an Oriental, the Germans never have known exactly what to make of him. Professor Francke says (History of German Literature, p. 526) that Heine "produced hardly a single poem which fathoms the depths of life." This assertion seems scarcely defensible in view of such poems as the following:

Wo wird einst des Wandermüden
Letzte Ruhestatte sein?
Unter Palmen in dem Süden?
Unter Linden an dem Rhein?

Werd' ich wo in einer Wüste
Eingescharrt von fremder Hand?
Oder ruh' ich an der Küste
Eines Meeres in dem Sand?

Immerhin! Mich wird umgeben
Gotteshimmel, dort wie hier,
Und als Todtenlampen schweben
Nachts die Sterne über mir.

To find an equally beautiful expression of faith in God as a universal spiritual presence that transcends all space relations, we must go back to the anonymous Jewish poet who wrote the psalm in which occur the lines:

"Whither shall I go from thy spirit?
And whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there:
If I make my bed in Sheol, behold thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea;
Even there shall thy hand lead me,
And thy right hand shall hold me.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me,
And the light about me shall be night;
Even the darkness hideth me not from thee;
But the night shineth as the day.
For the darkness and the light are both alike to thee."

As a matter of fact, both poems are to be accounted for as equally the product of a rarely gifted people—a people with a unique genius for religion.[D]

Disraeli and His Oriental Imagination