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series of Travel Pictures describing various countries he visited. These volumes are the most remarkable" travels " ever written; they have little to do with the places or people he saw or their impressions upon him, but are made up rather of biographical comments, political tirades, personal satires, religious and literary discussions, and now and then some of the finest verse he ever wrote. None of his other works show him at his best, and at his worst, so well as these "Travel Pictures." They offer us the most amazing, bizarre collection of sparkling wit, rollicking humor, cutting criticism, tender pathos, venomous satire, downright vulgarity, that was ever printed. We are by turns attracted and offended, but we read on, wondering what this piquant, poetic jester is going to say next. Whatever else they contain, they are full from first to last of Heine and his colossal egotism and, despite all efforts of the critics, remain today the best commentary on his character and genius. His description of Göttingen in the first volume is famous: Göttingen. The city of Göttingen, famous for her sausages and her university, belongs to the king of Hanover, and contains 999 houses, various churches, a maternity hospital, an observatory, a university prison, a library, and a Ratskeller, where the beer is very good. The river running through it is called the Leine and serves in summer for bathing; the water is very cold and is in some places so broad that Lüder had to get a good start when he jumped over. The city is very beautiful and is most pleasing when you look at it with your back. It must be very old, and when I first matriculated there was already well equipped with beadles, professors, dissertations, dance-halls, washerwomen, compendiums, roast pigeons, Guelph orders, graduation coaches, pipe bowls, councillors of law, prorectors, and other farces. The people are divided into students. professors, philistines, and cattle, but these four classes are by no means sharply distinguished, and the cattle class is far the most numerous. It would carry me too far to mention the names of all the students, and many of the professors have no name at all. For a long time I have determined to correct the impressions regarding the feet of the Göttingen ladies; I have heard lectures on comparative anatomy and made extracts from the rarest books in the library, and in my pamphlet I intend to treat (1) of feet in general, (2) of feet among the ancients, (3) of the feet of elephants, (4) of the feet of the Göttingen ladies, (5) of all that has been said about them in the students' beer garden, (6) of feet in connection with ankles, etc., (7) if I can get paper large enough I shall add facsimile illustrations.-Condensed from the original.

The effect of these volumes upon Germany was electric; never before had any one dared to write with such utter frankness. Here was a man

who used "not a style, but a stiletto," and a poisoned one at that, and Heine's stiletto. with Mephistophelean mockery turned this deadly weapon of his wit upon everything he disliked.

Seldom has a book in Germany elicited such loud and universal interest. Differences of rank and age vanished before the mighty impression. Forward-striving youth was inspired by its drunken dithyrambics, and gray Diplomacy sipped with secret delight the sweet poison whose hurtful effects it did not for a moment forget. It was the first free breath that followed a heavy, sultry atmosphere. A bold harlequin had leaped into their midst, brandished his wooden sword right and left, and by his antics excited the people to that merriment that could alone dispel their gloom. "—Julian Schmidt.

By a very narrow margin of safety Heine got his law degree in Göttingen, but now had to face the fact that no Jew could practise law in Germany. To make his living at law he must first renounce his Jewish faith. After due deliberation he did so. For this step he has been bitterly denounced by Jews and Christians alike, and was condemned now as a deserter, now as a hypocrite and pretender. To him it was simply a case of policy the best honesty, a change of creed for practical reasons,

Heine as a journalist.

At Paris.

without any change of heart; he was never an orthodox Jew, nor were his parents before him; his father was indifferent, his mother a disciple of Rousseau and Voltaire; he himself, trained by Jesuits and freethinkers, had "lost his faith before he had any to lose," and signed himself "sometime atheist to his Prussian majesty, now the worshipper of the lotus flower" (love and beauty). Though he renounced the Jewish creed, he never deserted the Jewish cause or the service of the Jewish people; born a Jew, he remained a Jew at heart, and may be regarded as the incarnate Voice of Jewish Protest against Christian persecution.

Regretting his change of creed as a mistake, and heartily detesting his profession, Heine again disappointed the cherished hopes of his mother and gave up law for journalism. He joined the staff of a great Munich newspaper and soon made himself felt and feared as a political correspondent and literary critic. But his stay there was short; his unbridled tongue and trenchant pen soon got him into trouble with the censorship, the climate was unbearable, the hoped-for professorship in the university went to another - he left Munich with another failure to his credit and at outs with all the world except himself. A trip to Italy added other volumes to his "Travel Pictures," but they hardly add to his fame. His voice is not lifted in manly protest, not in splendid defiance of real or fancied wrong; his wit has become the persistent, " pestering gadfly of petty passion." It is not strange that German princes lost patience and planned to put this insidious enemy behind bars that would protect them from further attack. Warned of his danger and disheartened by his attempts at a career in Germany, Heine turned his back on the Fatherland and went in voluntary exile to Paris, where, with the exception of two brief visits to his old mother in Hamburg, he spent the rest of his life. He did not turn traitor to his country, nor allow himself to be naturalized as a French citizen. He never hated Germany, but only her faults, which he never ceased to condemn. Behind all his cynical abuse there is evident to the unprejudiced reader the latent love of the old home, which next to his love of beauty and his unfailing affection for his mother, is his best redeeming trait. It is not possible to follow him. through the ups and downs of his twenty-five years in Paris. He felt a fierce joy on finding himself in this long wished for Eldorado of Freedom, little dreaming of the sorrow and suffering it had still in store. He plunged into the gay life of the French capital, and became intimate with her men of letters and art and politics. He lived by the help of his uncle Solomon and by his pen, as author and political correspondent of papers and periodicals. In his serio-comic vein he wrote on French art and life for German readers and on German literature, religion, philosophy, and society for the French. As an interpreter of civilization he writes with wonderful clearness and beauty, but shows no depth nor power. He was too unstable and volatile to be a real thinker about anything. His opinions are too subjective to be reliable; they are founded on personal pique and prejudice, rather than on facts; he was always fighting, but he fought with skill, not with power; not with Luther's battle-axe of truth, not with Lessing's broadsword of conviction, but with his own poisoned rapier of ridicule. Heine's proudest boast was that he would be called a liberator of thought and a leader of men. Such, however, he never was

nor will be, for he was not the master of great ideas, but the slave of great passions; he never learned that to lead others one must conquer first one's self; it was license not liberty that he stood for; Goethe's great doctrine of renunciation and denial of self for the good of the race he never accepted; he felt rather that this world owed him a place, and that a high one, and he meant to have it; the world should do him honor, if not in recognition of his merit, then out of fear of his satire. As a critic, therefore, Heine is essentially negative, he is always tearing down, never building up. His wit is a lightning bolt brilliant, but blasting; and when, as is usually the case, his faults, without his virtues, were imitated, he became a curse, not a blessing.

Heine took a wife in Paris, but, after the manner of many Frenchmen of his day, dispensed, for years at least, with the sanction of the church or the law. His Mathilde, as he calls her, an uneducated, frivolous, Mathilde. spendthrift woman of great beauty and spirit, was not a helpmeet in our sense, for she did not understand his genius or read his poetry, but she was a diverting companion and, in his last terrible illness, a devoted nurse. Though often tormented with jealousy, he felt deep affection for her, and the poems addressed to her are among the tenderest he ever wrote. The suffering of the last eight years of his life beggars all description. He was never physically strong, and his excesses had brought a gradual breakdown which resulted in acute spinal disease and paralysis. With wasted frame and emaciated face, unable to move his limbs, or even lift his eyelids without help, he lay for years on a pile of mattresses on the floor-slowly dying. The wonder is that the disappointed, desperate man did not go mad. If ever a reckless life was atoned for by the agony of suffering, it is here. The thought of it is enough to move a stone to pity and to make us forget all his scandalous abuse. We might even forgive him, if we could feel that his awful chastening had softened his heart; but it was not so. Dictating from his "mattress-grave" he is often more bitter and blasphemous than ever, and yet no diviner, sweeter song was ever heard than some of those that came from Heine's dying lips. His two strongest desires-to provide for his wife's future and to hide his desperate illness from his mother would do credit to a far nobler character. In his will he begs the pardon of any Heine's will. he may have offended, and yet with the snarl of a tiger he says: "Ha! I have them. Dead or alive they shall not escape me. Heine dies not like any beast. The claws of the tiger shall outlive the tiger himself." It seems the cry of a contrite heart when he says: "O God, make me a child again even before I die, and give me back the simple faith, the clear vision of a child that holds his father's hand." And yet to him that same God is "the mighty Aristophanes of Heaven who laughs at my calamities." He implores Divine forgiveness, and yet with dying breath reassures an anxious friend: "Set your mind at rest; God will pardon me, that's his trade." With that mockery on his lips, he went forth to meet his Maker. He died February 16, 1856.

It is difficult to understand Heine, and impossible to sum up briefly any adequate estimate of his character. He anticipated the trouble himself: "Bah! your Philistine critic will take my character to pieces and show how they contradict each other, and, like a schoolmaster, give me so many good marks for this quality

Heine compared

with other men of letters.

End of Required
Reading for the

C. L. S. C., pages
235-280.

and so many bad ones for that.
Deity

Biographers will weigh me grocer-wise, as Kant did the and when they have written three tons about me, they will understand me as little as the universe I reflect."

Heine stands unique among men of letters.

With more or less justice he has been compared with Burns, with Byron, with Beranger, with Voltaire, with Rabelais, with Shelley, with Sterne, and even better with Swift at times he is like them all, often not unlike Mephistopheles, but most like himself.

"This was a singer, a poet bold,

Compact of fire and of rainbow gold,
Compounded of rainbow gold and fire,

Of sorrow and sin and of heart's desire;

Of good and of evil and of things unknown,

A merciless poet, who cut to the bone.

He sounded the depths of our grief and our gladness,

He wept at our mirth and laughed at our madness;

He knew all that's strange in the world and that's rife,

He knew and yet knew not the meaning of life."-Pollock.

Brief selections can give but a poor idea of Heine's lyric genius, but a few of his characteristic poems, in the versions of various translators, may not be out of place.

1.

The lotus-blossom suffers

In the sun's splendid light;
And with her head declining,
She is waiting for the night.

The moon, he is her lover;

He wakes her with his rays,
And, her flower-face unveiling,
She sweetly meets his gaze.

She glows and blows, white-beaming,
Looks silent on high again,
Exhaling her perfume and trembling,
In love and love's sweet pain.

2.

On the wings of song far sweeping,
Heart's dearest, with me thou'lt go;
Away where the Ganges is creeping
Is the loveliest garden I know-

A garden where roses are burning

In the moonlight all silent there;
Where the lotus-flowers are yearning
For their sister beloved and fair.

The violets titter, caressing,

Peeping up as the planets appear,
And the roses, their warm love confessing,
Whisper soft sweet words to each ear

And, gracefully lurking or leaping,
The gentle gazelles come round;
While afar, deep rushing and sweeping,
The waves of the Ganges sound.
We'll lie there in slumber sinking
'Neath the palm-trees by the stream,

Rapture and rest deep drinking,
Dreaming the happiest dream.

3.

Fair she is as foam-born Venus,

She that was my love, my pride;
But a churl has stept between us,
Vaunts her as his chosen bride.
Heart mine, chafe not at the treason,
O thou much enduring one!
Bear, nay, deem it quite in reason
What the pretty fool has done.

4.

If the little flowers knew how deep

Is the wound that is in my heart,
Their tears with mine they'd weep,
For a balm to ease its smart.

If the nightingales knew how ill
And worn with woe I be,
They would cheerily carol and trill,
And all to bring joy to me.

If they knew, every golden star,
The anguish that racks me here,
They would come from their heights afar
To speak to me words of cheer.

But none of them all can know;
Only one can tell my pain,
And she has herself - oh woe-
She has rent my heart in twain.

5.

A pine-tree's standing lonely

In the North on a mountain's brow,