The old man to the stripling spake: "Prepare, my son!
Bethink our deepest songs, awake the fullest tone,
Nerve all thy strength, and sing of grief as well as love!
Our task is the proud monarch's stony heart to move."
Now in the pillared hall the minstrels stand serene,
And on the throne there sit the monarch and his queen ;
The king, in awful pomp, like the red northlight's sheen,
And mild and gentle, like the full moon, sat the queen.

The old man struck the chords, he struck them wondrous well,
Upon the ear the tones e'er rich and richer swell,
Then streamed with heavenly tones the stripling's voice of fire,
The old man's voice replied, like spirits' hollow choir.

They sing of spring and love, the golden time they bless
Of freedom and of honor, of faith and holiness.
They sing of all the joys that in the bosom thrill,
With heart-exalting strains the gilded halls they fill.

The crowd of courtiers round forget their scoffing now,
The king's bold warriors to God in meekness bow,
The queen, dissolved in raptures, and in sadness sweet,
The rose upon her breast casts at the minstrels' feet.

"My people led astray, and now ye tempt my queen?"

The monarch, trembling, cried, and rage flashed in his mien,
He hurled his sword, it pierced the stripling as it gleamed,
Instead of golden songs a purple torrent streamed.

Then was the host of hearers scattered as by storm,
The minstrel's outspread arms received the lifeless form,
He wraps his mantle round him, sets him on his steed,
He binds him upright fast, and leaves the hall with speed.

But at the portal's arch the aged minstrel stands,
His harp of matchless fame he seized with both his hands,
And 'gainst a marble pillar dashing it, he cries,
Resounding through the hall the trembling echo flies.

"Woe be to thee, proud pile, may ne'er sweet music's strain,
Amid thy halls resound, nor song, nor harp again!
No! sighs alone and sobs, and slaves that bow their head,
Till thee to dust and ashes the God of vengeance tread!"

"Ye perfumed gardens, too, in May-day's golden light,
Gaze here upon this corpse with horror and affright,
That ye may parch and fade, your every source be sealed,
That ye, in time to come, may lie a barren field!

"Woe, murderer, to thee! let minstrels curse thy name!
In vain shall be thy wish for bloody wreaths of fame,
And be thy name forgot, in deep oblivion veiled,
Be like a dying breath, in empty air exhaled!"

The old man cried aloud, and Heaven heard the sound,
The walls a heap of stones, the pile bestrews the ground,
One pillar stands alone, a wreck of vanished might,
And that, too, rent in twain, may fall ere cometh night.
Around, where gardens smiled, a barren desert land,
No tree spreads there its shade, no fountains pierce the sand,
Nor of this monarch's name speaks song or epic verse;
Extinguished and forgot! such is the minstrel's curse.

THE WATER SPRITE.

(By Justinus Kerner.)

It was in the balmy glow of May,
The maidens of Tübingen danced so gay.
They danced, and danced right merrily,
In the verdant vale, round the linden tree.
A youthful stranger, proudly arrayed,
Soon bent his steps to the fairest maid.
To the jocund dance the maid he led,
A sea-green wreath he placed on her head:
"Fair youth, O wherefore so cold thy arm?"

In the depths of the Neckar it is not warm.
"Fair youth, O why is thy hand so white?"
The wave is ne'er pierced by the sun's bright light.
With the maiden he dances far from the tree.
"O youth, let me go, my mother hails me!"
He danced with her to the Neckar's shore,
She tremblingly cried, "O youth, no more!"
He flung his arms round the maid, and cried,
"Fair maiden, thou art the water-sprite's bride!”
He danced with her down into the wave.
"O save me, dear father; O mother, save!"
To a crystal hall he conducted the maid,
"Farewell, ye sisters, in the green glade!"

HEINRICH HEINE.

THE greatest name in German literature after Goethe is that of Heinrich Heine. His was a

spirit in sharpest contrast to the Hellenic serenity of the Olympian of Weimar. Heine was fire, flame and smoke,lover, poet and satirist. With bewildering genius he turned from jest and sarcasm to earnest invocation, from verse to prose, from the depths of mockery to the heights of sentimental lyricism. Even in his most vulgar and boisterous cynicism the greatness of his spirit and intellectuality is nevertheless so manifest that he earned for himself the title of the German Aristophanes. "God's satire," he once exclaimed, "weighs heavily upon me. The great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly socalled German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery." In fact, Heine was an almost hopelessly fated bundle of contradictions. He declared: "I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy, I am comedy-Heraclitus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a god."

This "continuator of Goethe," as he has been styled by Matthew Arnold, was born at Düsseldorf, on December 13, 1799. In humorous sport he afterwards stated the date to be

the first of January following, in order that he might call himself "one of the first men of the century." Truly enough he was destined to be "the representative of a skeptical time of ferment." Born a Jew with the soul of a Hellene, he appreciated "Goethe with his clear Greek eye," but felt himself to be of a new political era, and more modern literary activity. Goethe's calmness could not but irritate this restless protestant against the whims of life. As Matthew Arnold has written:

"The Spirit of the World,

Beholding the absurdity of men,

Their vaunts, their feats, let a sardonic smile
For one brief moment wander o'er his lips,
That smile was Heine."

The environments of his childhood and youth served to develop and accentuate Heine's turbulently kaleidoscopic character. The grandson of the "little Jew with a big beard" was sent to a Franciscan convent and Jesuit academy, learned to kiss the hands of the monks and breathed in that Catholic atmosphere in which Romanticism was then thriving. But his lessons of French philosophy, as well as the French Revolution, stirred his young heart with a new fire. When he kissed his little sweetheart, Sefchen, the executioner's pretty daughter, he did it (he has left it on record) "not merely out of tender inclination, but also out of contempt for the old social order and all its dark prejudices; and in that moment there blazed up in me the first flames of two passions to which the rest of my life was dedicated love for fair women, and love for the French Revolution-for that modern Frankish furor with which I was seized in the battle with the mercenaries of the Middle Ages" (the old order in politics and the Romanticists in literature). In those days, too, the French rule in Düsseldorf was a blessing for the Jews, and as Heine puts it, "to the friends of freedom Napoleon appeared as a rescuer." In such soil were sown the germs of that heroworship for Napoleon, which later found utterance in his "Buch le Grand." At the age of eleven he saw the great emperor in the flesh. "The picture," he added years afterward, "will never vanish from my memory. I see him still,

HEINRICH HEINE.

THE greatest name in German literature after Goethe is that of Heinrich Heine. His was a

spirit in sharpest contrast to the Hellenic serenity of the Olympian of Weimar. Heine was fire, flame and smoke,lover, poet and satirist. With bewildering genius he turned from jest and sarcasm to earnest invocation, from verse to prose, from the depths of mockery to the heights of sentimental lyricism. Even in his most vulgar and boisterous cynicism the greatness of his spirit and intellectuality is nevertheless so manifest that he earned for himself the title of the German Aristophanes. "God's satire," he once exclaimed, "weighs heavily upon me. The great Author of the Universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven, was bent on demonstrating with crushing force to me, the little earthly socalled German Aristophanes, how my weightiest sarcasms are only pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably I am beneath Him in humor, in colossal mockery." In fact, Heine was an almost hopelessly fated bundle of contradictions. He declared: "I am a Jew, I am a Christian. I am tragedy, I am comedy-Heraclitus and Democritus in one: a Greek, a Hebrew: an adorer of despotism as incarnate in Napoleon, an admirer of communism as embodied in Proudhon; a Latin, a Teuton; a beast, a devil, a god."

This "continuator of Goethe," as he has been styled by Matthew Arnold, was born at Düsseldorf, on December 13, 1799. In humorous sport he afterwards stated the date to be