In general, it is fair to compare Heine between the philosophical thinking of France and Germany: While in France a philosophy was established which embodied, so to say, the spirit and recognized the spirit only as a modification of matter, in one word , materialism became prevalent here; in Germany a philosophy emerged, which assumed only the spirit of something actually, which declared each matter only to modify the spirit and even denied the existence of matter. It seemed almost as though the spirit beyond Rhine wanted to take revenge for the insult he had suffered on this Rhine. When here, in France, the spirit was denied, he seemed to emigrate to Germany, and there he denied the matter.
Heine attaches great importance to Scheeling's influence on German Romantics: "Since thanks to him the Naturist philosophy has gained momentum, the poets have begun to take a deeper understanding of nature. Some came to life with all of their human feelings in it, others had some magical formulas to find something human in nature and to make her speak with a human voice. The first were true mystics, and in many respects they reminded the Indian hermits who began to blend in with nature until they finally felt they were in communion with her. The others were rather spellbirds, they were self-urging by nature even hostile spirits, and resembling Arab magicians who, at their own will, could revive every stone and turn every life into stone. The former belonged primarily to Novalis, to Hoffman's second, above all. Novalis could see miracles everywhere and only wonderful miracles; he listened to the conversation of the plants, he knew the secret of every young rose, finally identified himself with the whole nature, and when the autumn came and the leaves fell, he died. Hoffman, on the contrary, could only see ghosts everywhere, they nodded at every Chinese coffee pot and every Berlin wig; he was a sorcerer who turned people into wild animals and wild animals even to royal Prussian court advisers; he could call the dead from their graves, but from life he was repelled as some vague apparition. With his inherently shaped tongue, Heine decides:" The slight rosary in Novalis's poetry is not the color of health, but of the urge, and the purple flame Hoffman's fantastic stories are not a fire of genius, but of fever.
The German poet was fascinated by the fiery temperament against the established morality of his great English fellow. After the death of Byron Heine, he mourned deeply, He was the only person I felt as a relative, and we must have looked like many things ... In recent years I have been reading rarely because people like to communicate more with people whose character is different from theirs. But I have always communicated with Byron as pleasantly as one person is communicating with a totally equal associate. The differences between the two great European poets who have worked through the era of Romanticism:" The parallel places, lines and directions that align Heine's poetry with Byron's poetry is of an occasional nature, and there is nothing to prove, for such parallels are not lacking among the verses of many other poets. By content, Heine differs radically from Byron.
Nevertheless, Byron's verse is like Viktor Hugo's verse, tense, with great impact, in some places even declamatory - Heine's verse, on the contrary, is measured, restrained, even whisper-whispering. Our eminent critic, Zdravko Petrov, recalls Heinhe's self-ironic assessment of himself as "a small German nightmare tucked into Voltaire's wig." According to him, "the heart and stylist, the blasphemer and the faithful Heinee begged and at the same time buried the multicolored old romance and made himself famous as" self-effacing fabulous king of Romanticism. " The German poet took upon himself the role of singer of the Venus of the enjoyment of Romanticism and, at the same time, of a hangman of this aging romanticism.