Germans was to bring literature down from the clouds into vital contact with the immediate problems of the day.  Thus there was developed a body of literature strongly polemic in purpose, quite hostile to the ideals of detachment and disinterested worship of beauty that Goethe and Schiller in their classical period had preached and practised.  This literature took the form of fiction, drama, and journalism, as well as of poetry.  Indeed, the only important lyric poet of the Young German group was HEINRICH HEINE (1797-1856), who had begun his career with the most intimate poetry of personal confession, in which the simplicity of the folk-song and the nature-feeling of the romanticist are strongly tinged with wit and cynicism.  Heine’s impatience with German conditions led him to expatriate himself, and from his retreat in Paris to aim venomous shafts of satire at his native land, with its “three dozen masters” and its philistine conservative nightcaps and dumplings.  This brilliant poet, with his marvelous mastery of German lyric tones, expressed a wide range of poetic inspiration; but he loved particularly to conceive of himself as an apostle of liberty, an outpost of the revolutionary army, and none so well as he could tip the barb with biting sarcasm and satire.  Heine’s personality was full of seemingly inconsistent traits.  He was both fanciful and rational, serious and flippant, tender and cynical, reverent and impious; and he could be at once a patriot and an alien.  He was, to use his own phrase, an “unfrocked romanticist”—­at once a brilliant representative of the poetry of self-expression and personal caprice, and an exemplar and prophet of a new ideal, the “holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the nations.”

The different attitudes of thoughtful men toward the influences of the time were variously reflected in the work of three leading poets, all older than Heine, who contributed largely to the lyric output of the period.  ADELBERT VON CHAMISSO (1781-1835), of aristocratic French descent, and using all the familiar romantic forms and motives, was yet thoroughly democratic and prophetically modern in his unalloyed sympathy with the impoverished victims of the social order.  It was something new for German poetry to find inspiration in the wrath of a beggar who cannot pay his dog-tax, the sardonic piety of an old widow reduced to penury by the exactions of the “gracious prince,” or the laborious resignation of an aged washerwoman.—­The Silesian nobleman JOSEPH VON EICHENDORFF (1788-1857), Prussian officer and civil official, was a consistent conservative in his political attitude, a pious Catholic, and a romanticist in every fibre of his poetic soul.  His lyrics are the purest echoes of folk-song and folk-lore, and the simplicity and genuineness of his art give an undying charm to his songs of idyllic meadows and woodlands, post-chaises, carefree wanderers, and lovely maidens in picturesque settings; all suffused with gentle yearning and melting into soft melody.