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Allusions to episodes from Sanskrit literature are not infrequent in Heine’s writings.  The famous struggle between King Visvamitra with the sage Vasistha for example is mockingly referred to in two stanzas (vol. i. p. 146).[195] His own efforts to win the favor of a certain Emma (Neue Ged. ii. 54) the poet likens to the great act of penance by which King Bhagiratha brought down the Ganges from heaven.[196]

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Heine’s prose-writings also furnish abundant proofs of his interest in and acquaintance with Sanskrit literature.  In the opening chapters of the Buch Le Grand (c. 4, vol. v. p. 114) he brings before us another vision of tropical Indic splendor.  In his sketches from Italy (Reiseb. ii. vol. vi. p. 137) he draws a parallel between the priesthood of Italy and that of India, which is anything but flattering to either.  It is also not correct; he notices, to be sure, that in the Sanskrit drama (of which he knows only Sakuntala and Mrcchakatika) the role of buffoon is assigned invariably to a Brahman, but he is ignorant of the origin of this singular custom.[197] In his essay on the Romantic School, when speaking of Goethe’s godlike repose, he introduces by way of illustration the well-known episode from the Nala-story where Damayanti distinguishes her lover from the gods who had assumed his form by the blinking of his eyes (vol. ix. p. 52).  In the same essay (ibid. pp. 49, 50), he bestows enthusiastic praise on Goethe’s Divan, and this brings us to the question of Persian influence upon Heine.

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Starting as he did on his literary career at the time when Goethe’s Divan and Rueckert’s Oestliche Rosen had inaugurated the Hafizian movement in German literature, it would have been strange if he had remained entirely outside of the sphere of its influence.  As a matter of fact, he took some interest in Persian poetry almost from the outset of his poetical activity, as his letters clearly show.  As early as 1821, he mentions Sa’di with the epithet herrlich, calls him the Persian Goethe and cites one of his couplets (Gul. ii. 48, qit’ah; K.S. p. 122) in the version of Herder.[198] In April, 1823, he writes from Berlin that during the preceding winter he has studied the non-Semitic part of Asia,[199] and the following year in a letter to Moser[200] he speaks of Persian as “die suesse, rosige, leuchtende Bulbulsprache,” and goes on to imagine himself a Persian poet in exile among Germans.  “O Firdusi!  O Ischami! (sic for Jami) O Saadi!  Wie elend ist euer Bruder!  Ach wie sehne ich mich nach den Rosen von Schiras.”  Such a rose he calls in one of his Nordsee-poems “die Hafisbesungene Nachtigallbraut” ("Im Hafen,” vol. i. p. 218).