ere subjected.

The contrast between his choice of residence for twenty-five years in
Paris, and the tenacity with which Goethe clung to his home, is not as
strongly marked as the contrast between the relative positions in
Frankfort of these two men. Goethe, the grandson of the honored
chief-magistrate, surrounded in his cheerful burgher-life, as Carlyle
says, by "kind plenty, secure affection, manifold excitement and
instruction," might well cherish golden memories of his native city.
For him, the gloomy _Judengasse_, which he occasionally passed, where
"squalid, painful Hebrews were banished to scour old clothes," was but
a dark spot that only heightened the prevailing brightness of the
picture. But to this wretched by-way was relegated that other
beauty-enamored, artist-soul, Heine, when he dared set foot in the
imperial Free Town. Here must he be locked in like a wild beast, with
his miserable brethren every Sunday afternoon. And if the restrictions
were a little less barbarous in other parts of Germany, yet how shall
we characterize a national policy which closed to such a man as Heine
every career that could give free play to his genius, and offered him
the choice between money changing and medicine?

It was not till he had exhausted every means of endeavoring to secure
a remission of the humiliating decree that he consented to the public
act of apostasy, and was baptized in the summer of 1825 in the
Lutheran parsonage of Heiligenstadt with the name of Johann Christian
Heinrich. During the period of his earnest labors for Judaism, he had
buried himself with fervid zeal in the lore of his race, and had
conceived the idea of a prose-legend, the _Rabbi of Bacharach_,
illustrating the persecutions of his people during the middle ages.
Accounts vary as to the fate of this work; some affirm that the
manuscript was destroyed in a fire at Hamburg, and others that the
three chapters which the world possesses are all that were ever
completed. Heine, one of the most subjective of poets, treats this
theme in a purely objective manner. He does not allow himself a word
of comment, much less of condemnation concerning the outrages he
depicts. He paints the scene as an artist, not as the passionate
fellow-sufferer and avenger that he is. But what subtle eloquence
lurks in that restrained cry of horror and indignation which never
breaks forth, and yet which we feel through every line, gathering
itself up like thunder on the hori