When Heine's wife died, he began to reflect upon the loss he had sustained.

They had both known poverty, and struggled through it hand-in-hand; and it was his greatest sorrow that she was taken from him at the moment when fortune was beginning to smile upon him, but too late for her to share in his prosperity.

"Alas I" said he, "amongst my griefs must I reckon even her love--the strongest, truest, that ever inspired the heart of woman--which made me the happiest of mortals, and yet was to me a fountain of a thousand distresses, inquietudes, and cares?
To entire cheerfulness, perhaps, she never attained; but for what unspeakable sweetness, what exalted, enrapturing joys, is not love indebted to sorrow! Amidst growing anxieties, with the torture of anguish in my heart, I have been made, even by the loss which caused me this anguish and these anxieties, inexpressibly happy! When tears flowed over our cheeks, did not a nameless, seldom-felt delight stream through my breast, oppressed equally by joy and sorrow!" There is a degree of sentiment in German love which seems strange to English readers,--such as we find depicted in the lives of Novalis, Jung Stilling, Fichte, Jean Paul, and others that might be named.

The German betrothal is a ceremony of almost equal importance to the marriage itself; and in that state the sentiments are allowed free play, whilst English lovers are restrained, shy, and as if ashamed of their feelings.
Take, for instance, the case of Herder, whom his future wife first saw in the pulpit.

"I heard," she says, "the voice of an angel, and soul's words such as I had never heard before.