zon for a terrific outbreak at the
end!

Would that we could hear the explosion burst at last! We long for it
throughout as the climax and the necessary result of the lowering
electric influences of the story, and we lay aside the never-to-be
completed fragment with the oppression of a nightmare. But a note of
such tremendous power as Heine had struck in this romance, required
for its prolonged sustention a singleness of purpose and an exaltation
of belief in its efficacy and truth, which he no longer possessed
after his renunciation of Judaism. He was no longer at one with
himself, for no sooner was the irrevocable step taken than it was
bitterly repented, not as a recantation of his principles--for as
such, no one who follows the development of his mind can regard
it,--but as an unworthy concession to tyrannic injustice. How
sensitive he remained in respect to the whole question is proved most
conspicuously by his refraining on all occasions from signing his
Christian name, Heinrich. Even his works he caused to appear under the
name of H. Heine, and was once extremely angry with his publisher for
allowing by mistake the full name to be printed.

The collection of poems in prose and verse known as the _Reisebilder_,
embraced several years of Heine's literary activity, and represent
widely-varying phases of his intellectual development. We need only
turn to the volumes themselves to guess how bitter an experience must
have filled the gap between the buoyant stream of sunny inspiration
that ripples through the _Harz-Reise_, and the fierce spirit of
vindictive malice which prompted Heine, six years later, to conclude
his third and last volume with his unseemly diatribe against Count
Platen. Notwithstanding their inequalities, the _Reisebilder_ remain
one of the surest props of Heine's fame. So clear and perfect an
utterance is sufficiently rare in all languages; but it becomes little
short of a miracle when, as in this case, the medium of its
transmission is German prose, a vehicle so bulky and unwieldy that no
one before Heine had dared to enlist it in the service of airy
phantasy, delicate humor and sparkling wit.

During the summer of 1830, while he was loitering at Helgoland, he was
roused to feverish excitement by the news of the July Revolution. He
inveighed against the nobility in a preface to a pamphlet, called
_Kahldorf on the Nobility_, which largely increased the number of his
powerful enemies. The literary