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terrified; it is with us as it is with the poor hen which has been set to hatch ducks' eggs, and with horror sees how the young brood rush into the water and swim so pleasantly.'

There is a tragic truth about this letter-tragic and prophetic too: his contact with Ferdinand Lassalle, the vehement restless positive child of the new time, had taught him that a new epoch was beginning in which he would have no share of activity, and this feeling was heightened by the foretaste and shadow of death with which he was already penetrated and environed, and which he was to feel slowly growing stronger upon him for ten weary years to come. The death-stricken man, with a life of disillusion and oppression behind him, could rise to no new hope, could be warmed.. with no new enthusiasm, and he settled down into a state of mind purely sceptical and critical towards all things social and political, sinking at times to the darkest depths of cynicism. A crowd of small poems which he wrote at this period were every one of them a scornful burst of mocking laughter against all existing things and persons. The whole world seemed to him to be a mad world, out of which all grace and nobility were being driven. In the horrible isolation of his independence, hoping for nothing and hardly wishing for anything, he made scorn of the popular movements of the time, and laughed in the faces of its kings. It is impossible in all modern literature perhaps to find more daringly satirical poems than 'The Song of Praise of King Ludwig,' the Emperor of China,' and the New Alexander,' aimed at Frederick William IV. and Louis of Bavaria. The hopeless irony which now consumed him is perhaps as apparent in the Verkehrte Welt' (the world turned upside down) as in any other poem of his written at this time, in which, after making most of some of the chief perverse signs of the times, Catholic owls defending the rights of liberty in education, puss in boots bringing Sophocles on the stage, an ape building a Pantheon for German heroes, even Mass

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mann taking to combing his hair (according to the German papers), German bears taking to Atheism, and French parrots to Christianity, he ends with :

But let us not swim against the stream-
That, brothers, will small help bring.
Let us clamber up the Templower Berg

And cry out, Long live the King!'

The year in which Heine entered on this last desolate stage of existence may be put down distinctly as 1845, the year in which his rich uncle Solomon died, and in which he had the first paralytic stroke.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FAMILY QUARREL.

On

BEFORE, however, the malady the germs of which were already ripening in his system had left upon him the marks of its first deadly spring, quenched the light of his eyes, and destroyed the elasticity of his nerves, Heine made two journeys to 'Verdammtes Hamburg,' in the years 1843 and 1844. He was led to undertake them chiefly by reason of the yearning which he felt to see his mother, who was now seventy-two years of age and whom he had not seen for twelve years. the occasion of the first journey he quitted Paris towards the end of October and travelled by Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Münster, Osnabrück, Hanover, and Bremen, and arrived at Hamburg on the 1st of November, remaining there until the middle of December. In the year following he repeated his visit in the month of July, going by way of Havre; and on this occasion he took his wife with him. Mathilde, however, received tidings shortly after their arrival at Hamburg, of the illness of her mother, and returned, after a few days' residence, back to Paris. These two journeys had this advantage for us, that they were the occasions of Heine's writing a series of letters to his wife, which enable us to obtain a near view of the tenderness and playfulness of his affection for her. We give but one of them here, containing some account of his first journey to Hamburg in 1843, reserving for later use some others of the series. It was written from Bremen, the city of the Twelve Apostles,' on the 28th of October, and will enable the reader to commiserate

the traveller in those days of the Eilwagen, and especially as in this instance the traveller seems to have been sadly deficient in wraps and travelling gear.

'Dear Treasure,-I am just arrived here, after travelling two days and nights: it is eight o'clock in the morning, and I start from here this evening, in order to reach Hamburg to-morrow. Yes, to-morrow I shall be at the end of my pilgrimage, which was very tedious and fatiguing. I am quite exhausted. I had much discomfort and bad weather. Everybody travels here in a cloak, I in a wretched paletot which only comes down to my knees, which are stiff with cold. Besides, my heart is full of care: I have left my poor lamb in Paris, where there are so many wolves. I have spent already more than a hundred thalers. Adieu! I embrace you. I write in a room which is full of people: the noise gives me the most frightful headache. A thousand greetings from me to Madame Darte, and to the charming capricious Ariccia (the ladies, mother and daughter, who kept the pension where Mathilde was lodging).-Heartily your poor husband, HENRI HEINE.'

Amusing details of Heine's first journey are to be found in his poem 'Deutschland, ein Wintermährchen,' written on his return to Paris in 1844,-details embellished and intermixed with the liveliest sallies and features of fancy and humour, according to which he interviews' Father Rhine, the Three Kings of Cologne, the Emperor Barbarossa, in the Kyffhäuser, and finally the goddess Hammonia herself, with all of whom he held conversations and delivered his opinions on the men and events of the day. Some of the touches of humour in this poem are inexpressibly quaint the very German post-horses, he says, waggled their tails at him and greeted him as an old acquaintance, and his renewal of acquaintance with his country's cookery is very drolly set forth.

'I left Cologne,' he writes in one chapter, at a quarter to nine in the morning: we came to Hagen about three, and there dined. The table was already spread. Here I found

complete the old German cuisine.

Be thou greeted, O sauer

kraut! blessed is thy odour! chestnuts and green cabbageso I ate them once at home. You homely salt fish, be you greeted! you swim so knowingly in your butter sauce. To every feeling heart is one's country dear. And I am very fond of a brown stew of red herrings and eggs. How the sausages exult in their hissing fat! The fieldfares, too, like pious roasted little angels, swaddled in apple-sauce, cried welcome to me. "Welcome, welcome," they twittered, "how long you have been away and been flirting with foreign birds in a strange land!" There was a goose upon the table, a quiet genial sort of body-perhaps she had been in love with me once when we were both young. She gave me a look so full of meaning, so deep, so true, so sorrowful; she no doubt had a beautiful soul, but her flesh was very tough. A pig's head, too, was brought in on a tin plate, and in a pig's snout in our country they always stick laurel-leaves.'

Another, too, of the drollest and most Heinesque passages of this book is Heine's discourse to the wolves in the Teutoburger Wald,' in which he addresses them as fellow-citizens,' and in which he makes some caustic remarks on the statue of Arminius then in process of being subscribed for.

Heine found Hamburg recovered from the great fire of 1842, which had laid three parts of the town in ashes. The city, he says, looked like a half-shorn poodle, and he found it of course much changed; he missed many of the old familiar streets, the house in which he felt the first kiss of love, the printing-house where the 'Reisebilder' were published, the oyster-cellar where he ate his first oysters, &c. ; but many of the people he met seemed more changed than the town, and looked so melancholy and broken-down that they were mere walking ruins. The lean man had become leaner, the fat fatter; the children had become old men, and the old men children. Many an one whom he took leave of as a calf was now an ox, and many a young goose was now a big goose with magnificent plumage.

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