passions of the hour and ought to occupy itself with the future little, if at all; and if by chance such a book falls into our hands, we usually read it with a mournful, and it may be a malicious, gratification at the exaggeration of its suppositions, the falsity of its predictions, the now-revealed folly of much of the sententious wisdom it enunciates. The salt, therefore, that keeps productions of this nature fresh must indeed be genuine, and the justice of Heine's views is sufficiently established by subsequent events to entitle the political opinions of their author, though a poet and a wit, to some respect, and to except this revival from the ordinary rules of decent literary interment. For although gift of prevision in public matters is, perhaps, but the perfection of common sense, yet, somehow or other, it is the quality least apparent in men holding high political station. It seems to be a sad necessity that the socalled practical men are limited to the knowledge of the hour that is slipping away beneath their feet, and that the man who sees far a-head is rarely permitted to provide against the coming evil or to improve the nascent good. Thus it may be nothing but a singular coincidence that the Duke of Orleans in Feb. 1840 appeared to Heine to have the aspect of a man anticipating a terrible catastrophe and earnestly desiring a war that he might rather perish in the clear waters of the Rhine, than in the gutters of Paris; but there is something more in the foresight which, in Dec. 1841, denounced in France the dissolution of the ties of common thought and principle, that extinction of esprit de corps which constitutes the moral death of a people, that absorption of material interests, which one fine day would permit a second 18th Brumaire to overthrow the bourgeoisie, a second Directory, and to establish the government of the sword with its din of glory, its stench of dying lamps, its rounds of cannon en permanence. Thus again, in 1842, he discerns in the coming time a mixed odour of blood and Russialeather, which makes him express a hope that the next generation may come into the world with backs strong enough to bear all that Fate prepares for them.

But there is one image of the future which exercises over him a terrible fascination, disturbing the clearness of his vision as it has done that of so many others. When he speaks of Communism, he is as panic-stricken as the authors of the 'Esclave Vindex,' and the Sceptre Rouge,' and yet he cannot get out of his head that the Socialists are the masters of the approaching world. With horror he looks forward to the rule of those sombre iconoclasts, whose horny hands will break to pieces the idols of beauty he loves so well, will tear down all

the pleasant frivolities of art, and pluck up the laurel-trees to plant potatoes in their stead. He mourns for the lilies that neither toiled nor spun and yet were dressed so gloriously, and who now will be torn from the ground; for the roses, the leisurely lovers of the nightingales, those unprofitable singers who cannot be allowed any longer to occupy time or space; and above all for the book of songs,' which now only the grocer will use to hold the coffee and the snuff of the ancient females of the years to be; and he attempts in vain to console himself by the reflection that the old society must perish because it is a whited sepulchre, and that those good old women will then have the aforesaid luxuries which our present institutions deny them. That this logical conclusion is a poor satisfaction continually breaks out, especially in the sincerity of his verse: where it is apparent how distasteful to him is that equality from below which he imperatively requires from above. Meeting M. Louis Blanc, soon after his Organisation du Travail,' he saluted him as l'homme le plus guillotinâble de la France, and describes him with a prescience, that was literally realised on May 15. 1848, as the Spartan Lilliputian, whom the people delighted in, because they could carry him on their shoulders, which could perhaps not support a colossal stature or a corpulent mind. In truth Heine was no sincere democrat, as the colleagues of his political youth found out and bitterly resented. The quarrel deepened on both sides; Börne and the German Republicans denounced him as an apostate, and he retaliated by fierce ridicule and disclosures of confidential relations and private affairs which no party differences can justify. In verses, too, such as these, he insolently sang his imagined recantation:

Alas! for the moth that has burnt his wings,
And sank to the rank of creeping things;
In foreign dust with creatures to crawl
That smell so strong, tho' they be so small;
'The vermin-comrades that I must swallow,
Because in the self-same mire I wallow:
As Virgil's Scholar of old knew well,
The Poet of Exile - the Poet of Hell;

'With agony I review the time

When I hummed at home my winged rhyme,
And swung on the edge of a broad sun-flower
In the air and smoke of a German bower.

'Roses were not too good for me,

I sipped them like the genteelest bee,

And high-born butterflies shared my lot,

And the Artist the grasshopper -shunned me not.

'But my wings are scorched. and I murmur in vain,

--

I shall see my Father-land never again;

A worm I live, and a worm I die

In the far-away filth of a foreign sty.

'I would to God I had never met
That water-fly,- that blue coquette,
With her winning ways and wanton taille,

The fair, the fair the false Canaille.'

We do not wish to leave the reader under the impression of these angry ejaculations; another and graver poem represents a more wholesome state of mind, and sums up with a manly sorrow those feelings which, we fear, are common to all men of poetic sensibility who deal with the coarser motives and meaner objects that influence public affairs.

'In Freedom's War, of "Thirty years" and more,
A lonely outpost have I held in vain :
With no triumphant hope or prize in store,
Without a thought to see my home again.
'I watched both day and night: I could not sleep
Like my well-tented comrades far behind,
Though near enough to let their snoring keep
A friend awake, if e'er to doze inclined.
And thus, when solitude my spirits shook,
Or fear, for all but fools know fear sometimes,
To rouse myself and them, I piped and took
A gay revenge in all my wanton rhymes.
"Yes! there I stood - my musket always ready,
And, when some sneaking rascal showed his head,

My eye was vigilant, my aim was steady,

And gave his brains an extra dose of lead.

'But war and justice have far different laws,
And worthless acts are often done right well;
The rascals' shots were better than their cause,
And I was hit—and hit again, and fell!
That outpost is abandoned: while the one
Lies in the dust, the rest in troops depart;
Unconquered I have done what could be done,

With sword unbroken, and with broken heart.'

When the palaces of Louis-Philippe were plundered in the revolution of 1848, the names of persons who received pensions from the civil list were published, and among others Heine was set down for two hundred pounds per annum. It may be imagined with what glee this intelligence was received by the enemies of Heine. His reaction was thus explained: he had been all along the paid advocate of the Orleans government, and his retirement

from the world about this time, from quite another cause, was attributed to his sense of the disgrace. But in truth there was nothing in the revelation to injure the character of the recipient or of the donor. M. Thiers was much attracted by the literary German, who was more lively and witty than the Frenchmen who surrounded him, and Heine was delighted with the Frenchman, in comparison with whose vivacity and agility of mind all other Frenchmen seemed to him little better than clumsy Germans. Heine took the money, which enabled him at his ease to defend the cause he approved and the men he liked, and these volumes are the best test of the great acuteness with which he combined fidelity to his friends with independence of spirit.

By the side of the political conflict that was ever going on in the mind of Heine was one of a deeper and more important character, to which we have already alluded. Speaking of Shakspeare in one of his earlier works, he describes him as being at once both Greek and Hebrew, and admires how in him the spiritual and the artistic faculties are so thoroughly amalgamated as to produce the completest development of the human nature. In making this observation, he was no doubt conscious of the unceasing warfare of those moral elements within himself, and of his difficulty to combine or reconcile them. He must have seen too as clearly as those about him, how these impressions were affected by his temperament and circumstances. In his gay health and pleasant Parisian days the old gods haunted and enchanted him, like the legendary Tannhauser in the Venus-Mountain, while in his hours of depression, and above all in the miserable sufferings of his later life, the true religious feeling of his hereditary faith mastered, awed, and yet consoled him.

The singular charm which the old Hellenic mythology exercises over certain minds is something quite separate from antiquarian interest or even classical learning. The little Latin and the no Greek which our poet Keats acquired at his Enfield seminary and in his study of Lemprière, seem a very inadequate source for the vivid, almost personal, affection with which gods and goddesses,

'Not yet dead,

But in old marbles ever beautiful,' inspired the author of Endymion and Hyperion. The sentiment indeed which produced and sustained the ancient religion was something very different from the modern reproduction; yet such examples as Keats and Heine attest the power of the appeal which Grecian genius made once and for ever to the

sensuous imaginations of mankind, and which all the influences of our positive and demure civilisation protest against in vain. But while the English poet yearned for that happy supernatural society with all the ardour of boyish passion, with Heine the feeling is rather that of a regretful tenderness, mourning over a delightful phase of human superstition, which he knows can never return, but which in his mind is ever contrasting itself with the gravity of the religion of sorrow and with piety divorced from pleasure. Like the entranced traveller of Italian story, he continually saw the exiled Olympians pass by him in divine distress, the milk-white oxen garlanded with withered leaves, and the children running with extinguished torches.

'And round him flowed through that intense sunshine
Music, whose notes at once were words and tears;
Paphos was mine, and Amathus was mine,
Mine the Idalian groves of ancient years, -
The happy heart of man was all mine own:
Now I am homeless, and alone-alone!'

The intellectual disposition of Heine was so averse to that habit of philosophical speculation, which has occupied, and even contented, the cultivated Germans, under their disastrous politics and the deficiencies of their social system, that there may be little to regret in the loss of the work on Hegel, which Heine asserts that he sacrificed to his growing sense of personal religion; nor can we distinctly represent to ourselves the picture of Heine at twenty-two, sentimentally contemplating the stars as the abodes of the blest, and of Hegel outstripping the author of The Plurality of Worlds,' by scornfully depicting them as 'spots on the face of heaven.' But it is undoubtedly true that in February 1848,- in the very paroxysm of France, Heine was struck down by that fatal malady, the agony of which has only lately closed, and during which the more serious elements of his character were necessarily brought to view. All that time he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlid like swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any one about him: and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his precision of diction, and his invincible humour. He bore his anguish in a perfectly unaffected manner, with no pretence of stoicism, and evidently pleased by tokens of sorrowful sympathy. He called himself the living Shade of the