sworn nothing--not even my
old pagan-gods, from whom it is true I have parted, but parted in love
and friendship."

"I am no longer a divine biped," he wrote. "I am no longer the freest
German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no
longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned
Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the title of a Grand
Ducal Wlimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent
Hellenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I
am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy
man."

Thus side by side flowed on the continuous streams of that wit and
pathos which he poured forth inexhaustibly to the very end. No word of
complaint or impatience ever passed his lips; on the contrary, with
his old, irresistible humor, his fancy played about his own privations
and sufferings, and tried to alleviate for his devoted wife and
friends the pain of the heart-rending spectacle. His delicate
consideration prompted him to spare his venerable mother all knowledge
of his illness. He wrote to her every month in his customary cheerful
way; and, in sending her the latest volumes of his poetry, he caused a
separate copy always to be printed, from which all allusions to his
malady were expunged. "For that matter," he said, "that any son could
be as wretched and miserable as I, no mother would believe."

Alas! if he had known how much more eloquent and noble a refutation
his life would afford than his mistaken passionate response to the
imputations of his enemies! Is this patient martyr the man of whom
Boerne wrote: "with his sybarite nature, the fall of a rose-leaf can
disturb Heine's slumber. He whom all asperities fatigue, whom all
discords trouble, let such a one neither move nor think--let him go to
bed and shut his eyes."

Only in his last poems, which were not to be published till after his
death, has Heine given free vent to the bitterness of his anguish.
During the long sleepless night when he lay writhing with pain or
exhausted by previous paroxysms, his mind, preternaturally clear and
vigorous, conceived the glowing fantasies of the _Romancero_, or the
Job-like lamentations of the _Lazarus_ poems. This mental exercise was
his protection against insanity: and the thought of his cherished
wife, he affirmed, was his only safeguard against the delirious desire
to seize the morphine bottle by his side, and with one drau