sometimes passionately, invoked in a tone of thought
completely nihilistic. One of the latest poems, alas! is
an expansion of the oft-repeated utterance of Achilles-
that it is better to be the poorest slave on earth than a hero
and a chieftain amid the shades on the banks of the Styx: yet
will he
cry at one time' It is well to die, but better were it
that a mother had never begotten us;' then at another, after
taking a retrospective view of the joys and sorrows of his life,
he ends a poem with the lines-

Farewell! Up above there, my nice Christian brother,
There again, we all know it, we'll find one another.

The opening poem of Lazarus' is amongst the most nihilistic of the whole: never was there a more blank expression of unbelief-it is absolutely nihilistic. This translation also is Lord Houghton's :

Leave those sacred parables,

Leave those views of true devotion;

Show me kernels in the shells,

Show me truth within the notion.

Show me why the Holiest one

Sinks by man's insane resentment,

While the vile centurion

Prances on in proud contentment.

Where the fault? By whom was sent

The evil no one can relieve?

Jehovah not omnipotent!

Ah! that I never will believe.

And so we go on asking, till
One fine morning lumps of clay
Stop our months for good or ill;
That's no answer-still I say.

In none of the poems, however, perhaps, of this collection is the peculiar humour of Heine's scepticism more distinguishable than in the following dialogue between the soul and the body

6

The poor soul says to the body, "I will not leave you, I will remain with you, I will sink with you into death, and night, and direct destruction. Thou wert ever my second 'I' which so lovingly encircled me as with a festal robe of satin lined with ermine. Alas for me! now must I waken, so to say, quite without a body, quite abstract, pine away as a blessed nothing up there above in the kingdom of light-in those cold halls of heaven, where in silence the eternities pass along and yawn at me. at me. Ob, that is awful! Oh remain with me, thou beloved body!"

'The body speaks to the poor soul: "Oh, console thyself and do not be vexed! we must bear in peace what destiny has allotted to us. I am the wick of the lamp. I must needs burn away, then the spirit will be clearer up there to shine as a little star of the purest splendour. I am but a rag myself -matter only, which vanishes like dry tinder, and shall become what I sprang from-vain earth. Now farewell, and console thyself. Perhaps, too, one amuses oneself better in heaven than you imagine. If you see the Great Bear there in the hall of the stars, salute him for me a thousand times."

We must, however, look for the most serious expressions of Heine's last convictions in his will. In this document, in which he is fulfilling the function of an ordinary citizen and husband in the face of death and eternity, there was no place for humour or for wit, and it is perhaps the only piece of prose of Heine's in which he is quite serious from beginning to end. In the seventh clause of the will he gives instructions for his interment in the Cimetière Montmartre, and it runs as follows:

I desire that my funeral be as simple as possible, and that the costs of my interment do not exceed the ordinary expense of that of the simplest citizen. Although by my baptismal act I belong to the Lutheran confession, I do not wish that the clergy of this church should be invited to my funeral; also I decline the official assistance of any other

priesthood in the celebration of my funeral rites. This desire springs from no fit of a free-thinker. For four years now I have renounced all philosophic pride and am returned back to religious ideas and feelings. I die in the belief of one only God, the eternal creator of the world, whose pity I implore for my immortal soul. I lament that I have at times spoken of sacred things without due reverence, but I was carried away more by the spirit of my time than by my own inclinations. If I unwittingly have violated good manners and morality, which is the true essence of all true monotheism, I pray both God and man for pardon. I forbid that any speech should be spoken at my grave either in German or in French.'

379

CHAPTER XIV.

LAZARUS IN THE BODY.

It was in the beginning of October 1848 that Heine became a resident in No. 50 of the rue d'Amsterdam, a house which became, from the fact of his long residence there in his Matratzengruft, or mattress-grave, of European celebrity.

The street is a long decent and quiet one, commencing at the terminus of the Versailles and Western railways and running up to the Place de Moncey, where was erected one of the largest barricades in the days of the Commune, and connecting the brilliant and stirring world of the interior Boulevards with the less brilliant one of the outer and with the regions of the Faubourg of Batignolles. Heine's apartment was situated at the back of the house up two steep pair of stairs and with windows looking on the court. The noise of the street was lessened by the intervening block of buildings, but, on the other hand, the sun never shone into the rooms except at midday,—a privation, however, which the poet endured the more patiently since to relieve his eyes he passed his time usually with the curtains partly drawn. It was in this new apartment that Alfred Meissner found Heine installed on his second visit to him in January 1849.

Two years later-in January 1849-I came again to Paris. Of a truth I was terrified, my heart contracted, when I saw Heine, and when he stretched out to me his white shrunken hand. At Montmorency, where I had last seen him, I beheld him suffering, it is true, yet still upright and capable of using his limbs, and with eyes yet open although

their look was sorrowful; now, in his new residence in the rue d'Amsterdam, I found him pale, withered, nearly blind-in short, just like a man who had not left his bed for more than a year.

It was evening as I entered, on the mantel-piece a lamp was burning, a broad screen of tapestry divided the otherwise small room into two parts; in the darkened part stood the bed. "Qui est là ?" was called. I gave my name; an exclamation followed, and as I stepped nearer a lean hand was stretched out towards me which endeavoured in vain to press mine. This hand was nearly transparent, and of a pallor and softness of which I have perhaps never seen the like.

'My whole spirit was so shaken that I sought in vain for words, and a long pause followed. Only the clock on the chimney-piece was to be heard ticking backwards and forwards, and from the opposite side of the court was heard the subdued clatter of a piano.

"See, my dear friend," said Heine at last, sorrowfully but with that ironical smile about his lips which he never gave up even later, "when, some time ago, you sung of the sect of the Adamites, you had no notion that your friend would become a convert to this sect. Yet it is so. Now already are two years gone by since I have lived as an Adamite and can only cover my nakedness with a shirt. Look you, it is nearly two years now since I have put on clothes."

He raised himself from the curtains and spoke of the way in which he had passed the time since we had last conversed. He told me of his almost uninterrupted torments, of his helplessness and of his Job-martyrdom, which had now lasted so long. He depicted to me how he himself had become nearly like a ghost, how he looked down on his poor broken ́racked body like a spirit already departed and living in a sort of interregnum. He described how he lived in images and intuitions of the past, and how gladly he would yet compose, write, and create, and how his blind eye, his unsteady