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,

high on horseback, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperator face, quiet as destiny, looking down on the guards marching by; and the old grenadiers looked up to him in awful submission,-stern accomplices, deathly proud: Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant." (Those who are about to die salute thee, Cæsar.")

This peculiar Napoleonic sentiment was perhaps at the bottom of Heine's lack of sympathy with Germany's War of Liberation. Regarding Napoleon as the incarnation of genius and of a new age, he thought mere nationalism to be “a contraction of the heart." He wrote his "Buch le Grand" to thunder against the jailers of ideas and suppressors of hallowed rights. He claimed "a very 'extraordinary professorship' in the University of high minds," and wished that not a laurel wreath, but a sword, be placed on his coffin, because "he was a brave soldier in humanity's War of Liberation."

In literature he began as a Romanticist and ended by giving that school its death-blow. In his history of the "Romantic School," he proclaimed himself "its abdicated fableking. . . . a disfrocked Romanticist." And yet, with that characteristic self-struggle of his entire life, he records, "there came over me once more an endless longing for the Blue Flower in the Romantic dreamland, and I seized the enchanted lute and sang a song ('Atta Troll') in which I surrendered myself to all sweet exaggerations, all moonshine intoxication, all blooming nightingale folly. It was the last free wood-song of Romanticism, and I am its last poet."

Trained as a Catholic in his youth, Heine later came in Berlin under the unsettling influence of Hegel, but after his sad years of exile in the Philistinic atmosphere of London, and after his long years of torture on his "mattress grave in Paris, he awoke at last to the truth of his inner self. "Often," he wrote to Campe, "a doubt quivers through me whether a man really is a two-legged god as Hegel told me twenty-five years ago. I am no more a divine biped. I am no more the high priest of the Germans after Goethe, no more the Great Heathen No. 2, a Hellene of jovial life and portly person, laughing cheerfully down on dismal Nazarenes. I am only a poor death-sick Jew."

Such was the forlorn Knight of the Rueful Countenance hidden behind Heine's laughing, sneering mask of irony, sarcasm, and mockery of bitter jests and sublime parody. A hopeless love for his cousin Amalie, the rich banker Solomon's daughter, the Molly of his early verses, clouded his whole life. "A hopeless youthful love slumbers still in the heart of the poet," declared Gerard de Nerval, his friend, long afterward in Paris. "When he thinks of it, he may weep even now, or else he presses back his tears in rancor. Heine himself has confessed to me that, after he lost this living paradise, love remained only a trade (métier) for him." Abandoning himself to dissipation and ruining his constitution, he finally became almost blind and voiceless in Paris (his city of refuge) and was brought by a spine disease to a "mattress grave" on the floor of his little attic room. Here, in the height of his fame, he lay, paralyzed and almost sightless, nursed by the faithful Matilde whom he rewarded at last by the name as well as offices of wife. It was, as he described it, "a grave without rest, death without the privileges of the departed."

This romance of unhappy love and this tragedy of pain have served both to dignify his memory and to furnish a more tenderly human interpretation to his writings, often so full of bitterness and wrath. Even in the grasp of Death, the usually witty sufferer could not quite forget the cruelties of life. "I have them," he exclaimed while inditing his Memoirs. "Dead or alive they shall not escape me. Let whoever has insulted me guard himself from these lines. Heine dies not like any beast. The claws of the tiger will outlive the tiger himself."

It was this constant battle of emotions, this restless oceanplay of wit, humor, satire, tenderness, indignation and pathos, that make his prose and verse both aglow with brilliant human interest. His "Reisebilder " (Pictures of Travel) is a masterpiece of satiric wit. His "Lyric Intermezzo" is full of perfect lyrics, such as "In the wondrous month of May," "An ashtree stood alone," etc. His "Heimkehr," and "Nord-See," cycles of songs, breathe the mystery and greatness of the sea in the noblest Byronic style. The

"Journey in the Hartz Mountains " is a mingling of all the chords of the emotions.

The loves of Heine may be treated in a paragraph, although they themselves were innumerable. He was scarcely eleven years old when he fell violently in love with "little Veronica," whose death he has so touchingly related. Then came Josepha, the executioner's daughter, already alluded to as Sefchen the Red. Amalie Heine was married to Johan Friedländer, of Königsberg. Heine's love for her enshrined itself in the "Intermezzo." After this unhappy episode came "double, triple, multiple love." In Paris in 1823, however, he met Matilde, then eighteen years old, and a milliner's assistant at her aunt's shop. Heine actually bargained with the aunt for her, but she proved to be an angel to him in his latter years of suffering. Another woman who cast a ray over his final years was Mme. de Krienitz, whose literary pseudonym was Camille Selden.

Gautier described the Heine of thirty-five as "a German Apollo. . . . A slight curve altered, but did not destroy, the outline of his nose. . . . To the divine smile of the Musagete succeeded the sneer of the satyr."

BOYHOOD IN DÜSSELDORF.

He

THE Prince-Elector, Jan Wilhelm, must have been a brave gentleman, very fond of art and skillful himself. founded the picture-gallery in Düsseldorf, and in the observatory there they show a very artistic piece of woodwork which he himself had carved in his leisure hours, of which latter he had every day four-and-twenty. In those days princes were not the persecuted wretches which they now are: the crown grew firmly on their heads, and at night they drew their night-caps over it and slept peacefully, and their people slumbered peacefully at their feet; and when they awoke in the morning they said, "Good morning, father!" and he replied, "Good morning, dear children!"

But there came a sudden change over all this. One morning when we awoke in Düsseldorf and wished to say, "Good morning, father," the father had traveled away, and in the whole town there was nothing but dumb sorrow. Every

where there was a funeral-like expression, and people slipped silently to the market and read the long paper on the door of the Town Hall. It was bad weather, yet the lean tailor Kilian stood in his nankeen jacket, which he generally wore only at home, and his blue woolen stockings hung down so that his little bare legs peeped out in a troubled way, and his thin lips quivered as he murmured the placard. An old invalid soldier from the Palatine read it rather louder, and at some words a clear tear ran down his white, honorable old moustache. I stood near him, crying too, and asked why we were crying. And he replied, "The Prince-Elector has abdicated." And then he read further, and at the words, "for the long manifested fidelity of my subjects," "and hereby release you from allegiance," he wept still more. It is a strange sight to see, when an old man, in faded uniform and scarred veteran's face, suddenly bursts into tears. While we read, the Prince-Electoral coat-of-arms was being taken down from the Town Hall, and everything began to appear as anxiously dreary as though we were waiting for an eclipse of the sun. The town councillors went about at an abdicating, wearisome gait; even the omnipotent beadle looked as though he had no more commands to give, and stood calmly indifferent, although the crazy Aloysius stood upon one leg and chattered the names of French generals with foolish grimaces, while tipsy, crooked Gumpertz rolled around in the gutter, singing Ça ira! Ça ira!

But I went home crying and lamenting, "The PrinceElector has abdicated." My mother might do what she would, I knew what I knew, and went crying to bed, and in the night dreamed that the world had come to an end-the fair flower-gardens and green meadows of the world were taken up and rolled away like carpets from the floor; the beadle climbed up on a high ladder and took down the sun, and the tailor Kilian stood by and said to himself, "I must go home and dress myself neatly, for I am dead, and am to be buried this afternoon." And it grew darker and darker-a few stars glimmered on high, and even these fell down like yellow leaves in autumn; men gradually vanished, and I, poor child, wandered around in anguish, until before the wil