ve from their belief in a new
convert, than in order to cut off from another party the more spiteful
satisfaction of bewailing his instability:

"That statement of time and place was entirely correct. I was
actually on the specified day in the specified church, which was,
moreover, a Jesuit church, namely, St. Sulpice; and I then went
through a religious act. But this act was no odious abjuration, but
a very innocent conjugation; that is to say, my marriage, already
performed, according to the civil law there received the
ecclesiastical consecration, because my wife, whose family are
staunch Catholics, would not have thought her marriage sacred enough
without such a ceremony. And I would on no account cause this
beloved being any uneasiness or disturbance in her religious views."

For sixteen years--from 1831 to 1847--Heine lived that rapid concentrated
life which is known only in Paris; but then, alas! stole on the "days of
darkness," and they were to be many. In 1847 he felt the approach of the
terrible spinal disease which has for seven years chained him to his bed
in acute suffering. The last time he went out of doors, he tells us, was
in May, 1848:

"With difficulty I dragged myself to the Louvre, and I almost sank
down as I entered the magnificent hall where the ever-blessed goddess
of beauty, our beloved Lady of Milo, stands on her pedestal. At her
feet I lay long, and wept so bitterly that a stone must have pitied
me. The goddess looked compassionately on me, but at the same time
disconsolately, as if she would say, Dost thou not see, then, that I
have no arms, and thus cannot help thee?"

Since 1848, then, this poet, whom the lovely objects of Nature have
always "haunted like a passion," has not descended from the second story
of a Parisian house; this man of hungry intellect has been shut out from
all direct observation of life, all contact with society, except such as
is derived from visitors to his sick-room. The terrible nervous disease
has affected his eyes; the sight of one is utterly gone, and he can only
raise the lid of the other by lifting it with his finger. Opium alone is
the beneficent genius that stills his pain. We hardly know whether to
call it an alleviation or an intensification of the torture that Heine
retains his mental vigor, his poetic imagination, and his incisive wit;
for if this intellectual activity fills