The lyric poetry of Germany in these years inevitably reflected the liberal sentiment of the time; it is always the radical emotion of any revolutionary period that finds the most effective lyric expression, the conservative state of mind being more characteristically prosaic. For the group of ardent spirits who made themselves the heralds of the new day, one of their number, the novelist and dramatist Karl Gutzkow, found the name "Young Germany." Just as the "Storm and Stress" of 1770 to 1780, and the Romantic movement of the opening nineteenth century, represented a spirit of sharp revolt against the then dominant pseudo-classicism and rationalism, so "Young Germany" reacted passionately against the moonlight sentimentality of the popular romantic poets, as well as against the stupid political conservatism of the time. The aim of the Young 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."