This could not be otherwise; for was he (Lenau) not an Hungarian by birth, an Austrian by adoption, and in his professional affiliations a German?  Had his interests not been divided between Vienna and Stuttgart, and had he not been possessed with an apparently uncontrollable restlessness which drove him from place to place, his patriotic enthusiasm would naturally have turned to Austria, and the poetic expression of his home sentiments would not have been confined, perhaps, to the one occasion when he had put the broad Atlantic between himself and his kin.  That his brother-in-law Schurz should wish to represent him as a dyed-in-the-wool Austrian is only natural.[116] However this may be, the poet does not hesitate to state in a letter to Emilie Reinbeck:  “Ein Hund in Schwaben hat mehr Achtung fuer mich als ein Polizeipraesident in Oesterreich."[117] And although he professes to have become hardened to the pestering interference of the authorities, as a matter of fact it was a constant source of unhappiness to him.  “So aber war mein Leben seit meinem letzten Briefe ein bestaendiger Aerger.  Die verfluchten Vexationen der hiesigen Censurbehoerde haben selbst jetzt noch immer kein Ende finden koennen."[118] Speaking of his hatred for the censorship law, he says:  “Und doch gebuehrt mein Hass noch immer viel weniger dem Gesetze selbst, als denjenigen legalisierten Bestien, die das Gesetz auf eine so niedertraechtige Art handhaben;—­und unsre Censoren stellen im Gegensatze der pflanzen- und fleischfressenden Tiere die Klasse der geistfressenden Tiere dar, eine abscheuliche, monstroese Klasse!"[119] Roustan expresses the opinion that with Lenau patriotism occupied a secondary place.[120] He had too many “native lands” to become attached to any one of them.

There is something of a counterpart to Hoelderlin’s Hellenism and championship of Greek liberty in Lenau’s espousal of the Polish cause.  But here again the personal element is strongly in evidence.  A chance acquaintance, which afterward became an intimate friendship, with Polish fugitives, seems to have been the immediate occasion of his Polenlieder, so that his enthusiasm for Polish liberty must be regarded as incidental rather than spontaneous.  Needless to say that with a Greek cult such as Hoelderlin’s Lenau had no patience whatever.  “Dass die Poesie den profanen Schmutz wieder abwaschen muesse, den ihr Goethe durch 50 Jahre mit klassischer Hand gruendlich einzureiben bemueht war; dass die Freiheitsgedanken, wie sie jetzt gesungen werden, nichts seien als konventioneller Troedel,—­davon haben nur wenige eine Ahnung."[121]

All these considerations tend to convince us that Lenau’s Weltschmerz is after all of a much narrower and more personal type than Hoelderlin’s.  Again and again he runs through the gamut of his own painful emotions and experiences, diagnosing and dissecting each one, and always with the same gloomy result.  Consequently his Weltschmerz loses in breadth what through the depth of the poet’s introspection it gains in intensity.