ing, and even to loss of life; nor could they hope for any protection or redress. No Jew might appear in any public place of amusement without incurring almost a certainty of stones and dirt being flung at him. They had a separate appointed quarter in each town, wherein, like lepers, they were caged, with closed gates, nightly. Nor was freedom granted them even to mate and marry at their pleasure, lest their despised race should become too numerous for facile oppression; and in many towns, we are told, notably at Frankfort, not more than twenty-five Jew marriages were permitted yearly.

This abominable persecution and degradation of his race and people, were one of the several forms of gross abuse of power and authority against which were later directed Heine's first efforts and young endeavours. Well can we conceive how his ardent soul chafed, when the horrid Jew-hunt took place that Frankfort celebrated when he was but nineteen years old, during which the accursed race were hooted and hunted like mad dogs, driven back to their own poor quarter, and there besieged and assaulted, stoned, and subjected to cruel usage. Nor may we count the public Jew-hunt that Hamburg, "Verdammtes Hamburg," indulged in while Heine was living there in 1830, as least in the determinant causes that forced him to flee his own land. Every abomination was perpetrated on the Jewish community: their houses were broken into, robbed, and destroyed; nor might any Jew dare be seen of the populace, without risk of life.

"The working of such influences on Heine's boyhood," writes Strodtmann, with great truth, "cannot be too sharply delineated if any adequate appreciation is desired as to the causes of development of his

of

The cause of liberty, and of equal justice to all men, as vindicated by the persecuted race to which he belonged by birth, next claimed the full sympathy Heine's delicate and ardent sensibility. A Jew "Verein," or association, had been formed, having for its purpose the emancipation of the Jewish people from the base condition of servitude in which they were kept. To obtain this result, the finest intellects of their community devoted themselves to the task of being ripe for, and of deserving, spiritual and political freedom, by taking for basis of their programme and endeavours, the highest philosophic conceptions. In 1822, Heine, still a student, being at Berlin, became an enthusiastic member of this society; and numerous are the letters he wrote to friends made at this period, which amply prove the wealth of passionate interest he lavished on this cause, with the sole result of seeing the noblest advocates of such capital dogmas of humanity obliged to flee the tyrannical German land, to seek in others more tolerant the liberty denied them there.

Finally, in his attempt to rouse

and help his Fatherland to emerge from the thraldom and heavy dulness of the "Bund," he made for himself powerful enmities, and reaped but vexation of spirit. With all the might of his youthful energy and recognised talent, he engaged heart and soul in the struggle against oppression, bigotry, and feudal privilege; but this effort likewise ended in disheartening failure. This great business of his lifethis large love, and wise purpose for his country, how was it rewarded? by failure-by hatred and petty spite-by banishment for himself, and by interdicts upon his writings, which could be read only secretly and by stealth in his native land! His publications were interdicted in Germany, and had to be smuggled across the frontier under the disguising binding of dictionaries and educational works, to satisfy the immense circulation they at once attained; whereas, for his personal share, incarceration in a German fortress was the threat ever hanging over him, and which at last left him no choice, as he himself puts it, "but to secure himself from the folly of the Government by quitting the country." This he did in 1831, to find in France that liberty for his pen and career that his own land had ever refused him.

The apostle of a gospel of freedom too great for Prussian acceptance, and of doctrines borrowed from the democratic teachings of the levelling French Revolution-doctrines too wide in their vast embrace for the petty States he strove to transform -Heine found enemies in his own land, bitter and strong, and these not amongst the small-minded only, but amongst those who like himself were honestly striving for the German common weal, but who failed to comprehend the true bearing of his efforts. In Heine's

love and purpose for Germany, joined to his affection and admiration for France-in these two feelings we find the key to all his political and satirical writings. Dying, he wrote, "It was the great business of my life to labour at a cordial understanding between Germany and France, and to foil the artifices of those enemies of the democracy who cultivate to their profit international prejudices and animosities. In so doing I consider I have deserved as well at the hands of my countrymen as of the French."

Poor Heine! it was not only in his outer life that he found grief and disappointment. His sensitive poet soul, gifted with impassioned genius and a heart attuned to all the mysterious communings of sea and stars, forest and field, by nature open to all joyous and genial things, was poisoned in its glad spring-time by the unfaithfulness of her who had been honoured by inspiring the miracle of adoration of a poet's first love. What might not Heine's rich faculties have produced, if the woman into whose keeping the impassioned young poet had given his very soul, had not basely and treacherously forsaken him!

We have a theory of our own to explain the many contradictory outcomings of one and the same heart, which, all ardour to-day, is as ice tomorrow-which, fearful and trembling at a falling leaf one time, is capable of superhuman courage and reckless daring at another, of the heart in which none but violetsweet and modest thoughts dwell one day, but which the next may give vent to the scorching, hot desires of the courtesan's wildest imaginings, and which, pious and prayerful, has exhaled heavenwards but humblest petitions or thanks, yet which in some hidden fold conceals the bitter revolt against supreme decrees, which may some day

break forth in fiercest ravings and imprecations against the fiat of the gods! Our theory is, that as in the Garden of Eden all things were contained in germ, and in embryo, so is it also in the heart of man, every man having in him the seeds of all things good, of all things lofty, and of all that is lovely and sweet, but likewise the roots of all wrong and evil. In that beauteous Paradise were lurking the serpent and the toad; and in the soul of manmade in God's high image-are dormant the many low and crawling, the numerous venomous and hurtful things that mar its beauty, bringing as retribution all pain and evil. And who shall say which will prove mightier, of embryo good, or embryo ill? Who may tell which shall eventually triumph of the sweet or bitter influences? Who may venture to foretell whether the rays of circumstance will call into life the splendid flowery growths of the soul, or raise up noxious miasmas that will poison the whole heart?

This theory, if admitted, explains the undue development of Heine's bitter and stinging qualities, to the detriment of faith and hope, early shattered by cruel events. To what heights might not Heine's love have raised him, had he found in it the realisation of his pure ideal, and the wholesome felicities and fostering affections needed for the expansion of all the noble gifts wherewith nature had so plenteously endowed him! Had Heine's fine and tender feelings, his bright and fervent soul, found in the young girl he loved a spirit capable of understanding his -of exalting all the passionate worship of his heart by satisfying the full needs of his being-of moulding his character by stimulating its nobler instincts-and of perfecting it by bringing into harmony all discordant elements, who

can

doubt that the great faults that all we who love Heine deplore in his life's work, would not have been, and that excellence of a higher order might have been attained both by the man and the philosopher, and perhaps even by the poet ?

The story is a common one-the "old tale, often told." With a high-souled generosity that betrays the depth and delicacy of his feelings for her he loved, Heine, all his life long, carefully abstained from entering into any details of their mutual relations, or from ever mentioning her name. In countless ballads, in heart-rending verse, he has sung in touching accents his undying grief and misery-his evertorturing remembrance of the faithless one, with her "Engelsköpfchen, am Rheinwein gold grund." But in all he tries to screen his false love by endless and perplexing transformations of names and circumstance, keeping, during his whole lifetime, as a sacred mystery the name of his worshipped darling. In 1827, however, writing to his tried friend, Varnhagen von Ense, he somewhat lifts the veil that enshrouds the features of his heart's idol.

The Herzliebchen was his cousin, Amalie Heine, hardly younger than himself, for it was a boy-and-girl courtship; he was but nineteen, she eighteen years old. He left her in order to achieve literary distinction at the universities; during his absence his promised bride became another man's wife. From the consequences of this cruel shock Heine never recovered; the treachery of her he loved and trusted wounded him mortally. He lived, but bearing within his breast a poisoned and rankling wound that never healed.

A later source of bitterness welling up in poor Heine's bosom, was one not from without, but from within-one springing from the evil

acting thoughts that result from wrong done consciously. He was a renegade and an apostate, for a miserable mess of pottage, which in the end was not even awarded him in poor recompense of his selfscorn and contempt. He sold his birthright! Yes, Heine, the earnest champion of the rights of his people, the ardent member of the Jew Verein-Heine, so full of the great "Jew anguish," was untrue to the faith of his fathers, and stained his manhood by accepting Christian baptism, whilst loathing it, in the wretched hope of earning an independent position for which his soul sickened a position which the narrow-minded intolerance of the Prussian Government left no hope of, unless as price of his conversion.

-a

His scorn of himself for this lamentable error, is equalled only by his hatred of the bigotry that extorted from him this shameful concession. Hence the cruel cynicism that disfigures his writings on religious topics,-hence the biting Scourge with which he so often lacerates his writhing self. "I often get up in the night, and stand before the glass and curse myself," he writes to his friend Moser. Hence much, also, that startles and shocks us, both in the man and in his work.

Can we wonder if all this wasted labour and love, this misery of self-reproach, embittered his words and acts, and deteriorated some of the sweeter qualities of his nature? For his whole being was warped, and never enjoyed development in a congenial atmosphere and life. His instinctive longing, he writes in 1830, was for a position that would have permitted him to give himself up, wholly unfettered, to his natural inclinations, to his dreamy character and ways, to his fantastic imaginings and reflection. But the

irony of fate gave him as destiny to scourge his poor fellow-Germans out of their comfortable repose, and to goad them into action. "I, whose dearest occupation is to watch the clouds drift, to contrive the spell of metrical words, to hearken unto the mysteries of the spirits of the elements, and to lose myself in the wonder-world of ancient legends, I had to send forth political annals, to carry out the interests of the day, to make a programme for revolutionary desires, and give the spur to men's passions. I am weary, and yearn for peace. In Germany none is possible."

Thus sick at heart from wearing disappointment, like an angry child, Heine in his wrath strikes at friends and foes, at things high as at things mean - at things profane and at things holy, -and writes 'The Town and Baths of Lucca,' which none of his comrades, dearest friends, or literary partisans, found any word to praise, although overflowing with thought, and wit, and satire, because so marred and debased is it by coarseness, irreligion, and objectionable matter, that disgust overpowers admiration. From such faults we turn hastily away, leaving them to Him of whom Heine in his death - throe said, "Dieu me pardonnera-c'est son métier."

While Heine's friendship was both tender and passionate, his heart remaining ever grateful and open to those who, like Varnhagen von Ense and his true-souled helpmate, made him know "the glow of friendship and the breath of love,' he gave no quarter to his foes, far too often yielding to the desire he was so easily able to gratify, of avenging himself on his enemies, by lashing them with his satire, or stinging them by his keen powers of ridicule.