its earliest efforts his genius showed a strongly
specific character.

It will be easily imagined that the germs of poetry sprouted too
vigorously in Heine's brain for jurisprudence to find much room there.
Lectures on history and literature, we are told, were more diligently
attended than lectures on law. He had taken care, too, to furnish his
trunk with abundant editions of the poets, and the poet he especially
studied at that time was Byron. At a later period, we find his taste
taking another direction, for he writes, "Of all authors, Byron is
precisely the one who excites in me the most intolerable emotion; whereas
Scott, in every one of his works, gladdens my heart, soothes, and
invigorates me." Another indication of his bent in these Bonn days was a
newspaper essay, in which he attacked the Romantic school; and here also
he went through that chicken-pox of authorship--the production of a
tragedy. Heine's tragedy--_Almansor_--is, as might be expected, better
than the majority of these youthful mistakes. The tragic collision lies
in the conflict between natural affection and the deadly hatred of
religion and of race--in the sacrifice of youthful lovers to the strife
between Moor and Spaniard, Moslem and Christian. Some of the situations
are striking, and there are passages of considerable poetic merit; but
the characters are little more than shadowy vehicles for the poetry, and
there is a want of clearness and probability in the structure. It was
published two years later, in company with another tragedy, in one act,
called _William Ratcliffe_, in which there is rather a feeble use of the
Scotch second-sight after the manner of the Fate in the Greek tragedy.
We smile to find Heine saying of his tragedies, in a letter to a friend
soon after their publication: "I know they will be terribly cut up, but I
will confess to you in confidence that they are very good, better than my
collection of poems, which are not worth a shot." Elsewhere he tells us,
that when, after one of Paganini's concerts, he was passionately
complimenting the great master on his violin-playing. Paganini
interrupted him thus: "But how were you pleased with my _bows_?"

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Gottingen. He there pursued his omission of
law studies, and at the end of three months he was rusticated for a
breach of the laws against duelling. While there, he had attempted a
negotiation with Brockhaus for the printing of a volume of poems,