satisfaction in his own weaknesses and miseries, introverting the very sensations of pleasure and pain, he not only checks the sympathy he might otherwise have won, but his very courage is interpreted into an unnatural audacity, alike defiant of the will of Heaven and of the aid of man. The deep consolations of this faculty in the trials and extremities of life are altogether unknown to them; and it is only now that Heinrich Heine has passed away-now that the bold handling of men and things by that implacable humourist can offend no more- - that we would ask for a merciful judgment of a character which contained many elements of moral greatness, and for a just appreciation of those rare talents, which gave glory to his youth, and did not desert him in the bitterest sufferings of his maturity.

Never, indeed, did a volume of verse receive a more general and immediate welcome than did the 'Buch der Lieder' in Germany. The most conventional classes were not proof against the charm of its simplicity and truth; old statesmen like Gentz, who in the abstract would have liked to have shut up the young republican in a fortress, spoke of the book as giving them an Indian 'summer of pleasure and passion;' philosophers to whom such doctrine as they found there seemed sensuous, and theologians to whom some light treatment of serious matter was naturally painful, were subdued by the grace of the youth who stood ready to take the throne the ancient Goethe was about to leave, and were glad to attribute the errors they lamented to the circumstances of his family life and to the effervescence of his fresh imagination. The very lightness of these admirable lyrics makes it most difficult to reproduce them in another tongue. Mr. Julian Fane's good scholarship renders his translations the most agreeable to those who are acquainted with the originals, but his attempt to transfer to another language many of the most peculiar idioms and most vivacious turns of thought is frequently unsuccessful. Mr. Wallis, less ambitious of accuracy, is happier in the general effect, and exhibits in a great degree that facility of diction which substitutes a fair alternative of analogous expression where an accurate version is difficult or impossible. These, and some skilful American translations, will 800n make the English public thoroughly familiar with the earlier poems of Heine; and the ease with which they can be read in the original will always make them one of the pleasantest vestibules into the many mansions of German literature. Between those productions and the volumes before us there lie indeed many eventful years, but less difference in the characteristics of the author than he himself was wont to imagine. He frequently spoke of his early writings with a regretful tenderness,

VOL. CIV. NO. CCXI.

as of a happy world now lost to view; but the critic may remark that there is no stamp of mind so indelible as that of the poetic humourist, and that where those powers once vigorously coexist no changes or chances can divorce them altogether. There may be no palpable humour in Thomas Hood's Song of the Shirt,' or Bridge of Sighs,' and yet we feel that these poems are the expression of the gay, common sense of his earlier mind refined into the most solemn pathos by the contemplation of the sorrows of humanity. Thus too in the retrospect of Heine's inner self, which forms the most interesting portion of these pages, the voice that comes from the bed of long sickness and approaching death is the very same that trolled out those delightful melodies that every boy and woman in Germany knows by heart.

In making these volumes the text of some remarks, which may illustrate the individuality of Heine, and his relation to the time in which he lived, we must premise that that relation had throughout the calamity of a false position. With so acute a sense of classical forms and antique grace as to make him often well content to live

'A Pagan suckled in a creed out-worn,'

He

he was regarded as a chief of the Romantic school; with a genial and pleasure-loving temperament, he was mortified by physical infirmity and moral disappointment into a harsh and sometimes cruel satirist; with a deep religious sentiment, and even narrow theological system, he was thrust into the chair of an apostle of scepticism; with no clear political convictions or care for theories of government, he had to bear all the pains and penalties of political exile, the exclusion from the commerce of the society he best enjoyed, and the inclusion among men from whom he shrank with an instinctive dislike. The immediate cause of his banishment from Germany has never been clearly stated. does not seem to have been the object of any particular prosecution, but he had made himself sufficiently obnoxious to the authorities to make his existence in Germany insecure. When questioned in France as to his nationality, he used to call himself Prussien libéré, and he writes that he had been haunted with unpleasant visions, had seen himself in the attitude of Prometheus, and had fancied the sun turned into a Prussian cockade. A high legal functionary had also told him that Spandau was very cold in winter; that no oysters came there, so far from the sea; and that the inhabitants caught no game except the flies which fell into the soup; so on the 1st of May, 1831, he betook himself to the fatherland of Champagne and the Marseillaise. From this time forward, we see him doing all he can to make himself

a Frenchman, but without success. There is always an old-German-we would say, notwithstanding all his anti-Anglicanism, English humour-which stands between him and the French mind with its clear wit and its hard logic. But the ingenuity, the readiness, above all the gaiety, of the Parisians, seemed to him almost a necessity of existence, for which his temperament had hitherto yearned in vain: it was not the old Greek life, but it was something like it, in its open-air liveliness, its alert passage from thought to thought, its keen relish of sensual pleasure.

In contrast to this, therefore, his impressions of England, which he visited shortly after, were proportionably disagreeable. London struck him mightilylike the stroke of a cudgel over his shoulders;' and he found in the astonishment of the waiter at the Piazza Coffee-house, when he asked him to bring him for breakfast one of the fine cauliflowers he saw below him, a type of the horror with which we regard any deviation from our national manners. He called us a country where all the machines moved like men, and all the men so like machines, that he was continually looking to discover where they were wound up; and even in his last days, when calmer judgment and some relations of personal affection had made him recant much of his distaste to us, he still suggested that 'Bria, or Britinia, the White Island of Scandinavian my'thology, to which the souls of the heroes were transported 'after death, was nothing more nor less than that Albion 'which even now looks so very dead-alive to all strangers.'

An historical incident of the Bonaparte dynasty, in connexion with his private life, had singularly affected his boyish fancy. The grand Duchy of Berg, of which Dusseldorf (his birthplace) was the capital, passed from the possession of the Elector Palatine to that of Bavaria, and thence was unceremoniously transferred to the dominion of General Murat in exchange for the Bavarian Tyrol, which Napoleon had wrested from the empire of Austria. But in those days advancement was rapid, and the Grand Duke of Berg becoming king of Naples, abdicated his duchy in favour of the eldest son of Louis king of Holland. Thus,' writes Heine in 1854, Louis Napoleon, who never abdicated, is my legitimate sovereign.' Be this as it may, the impressions made on him by the French Occupation were never erased.

6

'In those days, princes were not the persecuted wretches that they now are; their crowns grew firmly on their heads, and at nighttime they drew their caps over them, and slept in peace, and their people slumbered calmly at their feet, and when they awoke in the morning, they said, Father! good morning, and he answered, Good

196

morning, my dear children. But there came a sudden change over all this; for one morning when we awoke and wanted to say, Good morning, Father, the Father had trundled off, and mute sorrow reigned throughout the town.'

But as far as the boy Heine was concerned, this feeling was soon dispersed, for he saw Him—the Emperor.'

6

'The Emperor, with his cortége, rode straight down the avenue of the Hofgarten at Dusseldorf, notwithstanding the police regulations that no one should ride down the avenue under the penalty of a fine of five dollars. The Emperor, in his invisible green uniform, and his little world-renowned hat, sat on his white charger, carelessly, almost lazily, holding the rein with one hand, and with the other goodnaturedly patting the neck of the horse. It was a sunny marble hand, one of the two which had bound fast the many-headed monster of anarchy to pacify the war of races, and it good-naturedly patted the neck of the horse. The face too of the hue which we find in the marble busts of Greeks and Romans, the features as finely proportioned as in antiques, and a smile on the lips warming and tranquillising every heart, while we knew that those lips had but to whistle et la Prusse n'existait plus, and to whistle again and all the Holy Roman The brow was not so clear, Empire would have danced before him.

for the spectres of future conflicts were cowering here; and there were the creative thoughts, the huge seven-mile-boot thoughts, in which the spirit of the Emperor strode invisibly over the world, every one of which thoughts would have given a German author full materials to write about all the rest of his natural life.'

If the enthusiasm of Heine had been confined to pleasant images like these, he would only have asserted a poet's privilege, but there is too much ill-will to others mixed up with this heroworship to allow it to be so simply vindicated. His relation to that marvellous people, of whom Goethe has somewhere said, that Providence committed to their care the moral law of the world, not because they were better or wiser than others, but because they were more obstinate and persistent, not only alienated him from the national cause of Germany, but gave him a vindictive gratification in its discomfiture: he enjoyed the very tempest which brought down the pride of German States almost to a level with the dependence and insignificance of his own race, just as in later years he directed his bitterest irony against the slaves who had been let loose in the peril of the storm to work the pumps, and draw the cables and risk their lives, but who, when the good ship floated safe once more, were turned back into the hold and chained nicely down again in political darkness. Thus, the poem of Deutschland' is the one of his works where his humour runs over into the coarsest satire, and the malice can only be excused by the remembrance

that he too had been exposed to some of the evil influences of a servile condition.

Among these, no doubt, may be reckoned the position of a man of commercial origin and literary occupation in his relation to the upper order of society in the northern parts of Germany. There the high mental cultivation and reflective character of the youth of the middle and lower classes contrasts dangerously with the almost exclusive military tastes of the nobility. The arrogance engendered by the continual exercise of Man as a mere mechanical agent, and by the habit of regarding physical force as the main legitimate instrument of authority, is there unsupported by that predominant wealth and ancient territorial possession which give the strength of prescription even to a questionable assumption of command. There the lines of demarcation are nearly as precise as in the middle ages, but the barriers which protected them are broken down, and the gaping crowd look enviously and without hindrance into the sacred enclosure. The majority indeed are absorbed into Beamte and Philister, but there remains full sufficient element of discontent to justify the recorded expression of a philosophic German statesman, that in Prussia the war of classes had still to be 'fought out.' And this in truth was the mainspring of Heine's radicalism. This made him delight even in the system which preached equality under the sword, and in which every peasant felt that though not a freeman he might become a king. This it was which made him unable to comprehend the far different condition and popular associations of British aristocracy, and made him write that he grudged not the eighteen-pence he paid to see Westminster Abbey, for he saw there that the great of the earth were not immortal, and told the verger he was delighted with his exhibition, but would willingly have paid as much again if he could have seen that collection complete; for 'as long as the aristocrats of England are not gathered to their fathers, as long as the collection at Westminster is not complete, so long remains undecided the battle between Birth and the 'People, and the alliance between England and French citizen'ship unstable and insecure.'

6

And yet it was in the Parliamentary Government of France that Heine found the only real political satisfaction expressed in his writings. The two last volumes of his Miscellaneous Works contain the letters he furnished to the Augsburg Gazette from 1840 to 1844, in the character of our own corre'spondent.' This kind of republication is rarely interesting, whatever amount of ability it displays. The best periodical writing from its nature is bound up with the interests and