amazing as coming from an unbeliever, did we not see in it evidence of
the poet's capacity for perfect sympathetic adoption of the spirit of
his early environment. The same is true of many another poetic
expression of simple faith, whether in Christianity or in the
mythology of German folk-lore.

Interest in medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most
prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its
culmination during the boyhood of Heine. The history of Heine's
connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circumstances of
his first contact with it. He tells us that the first book he ever
read was _Don Quixote_ (in the translation by Tieck). At about the
same time he read _Gulliver's Travels_, the tales of noble robbers
written by Goethe's brother-in-law, Vulpius, the wildly fantastic
stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Schiller's _Robbers_; but also Uhland's
ballads, and the songs collected by Arnim and Brentano in _The Boy's
Magic Horn_. That is to say: At the time when in school a critical and
skeptical mind was being developed in him by descendants of the age of
enlightenment, his private reading led him for the most part into the
region of romanticism in its most exaggerated form. At the time,
furthermore, when he took healthy romantic interest in the picturesque
Dusseldorf life, his imagination was morbidly stimulated by furtive
visits to a woman reputed to be a witch, and to her niece, the
daughter of a hangman. His earliest poems, the _Dream Pictures_,
belong in an atmosphere charged with witchery, crime, and the
irresponsibility of nightmare. This coincidence of incompatible
tendencies will later be seen to account for much of the mystery in
Heine's problematic character.

It having been decided, perhaps because the downfall of Napoleon shut