models of
propriety: the old man, alas! had stuck to the wine-flask."

In his "Gestandnisse," the retractation of former opinions and profession
of Theism are renewed, but in a strain of irony that repels our sympathy
and baffles our psychology. Yet what strange, deep pathos is mingled
with the audacity of the following passage!

"What avails it me, that enthusiastic youths and maidens crown my
marble bust with laurel, when the withered hands of an aged nurse are
pressing Spanish flies behind my ears? What avails it me, that all
the roses of Shiraz glow and waft incense for me? Alas! Shiraz is
two thousand miles from the Rue d'Amsterdam, where, in the wearisome
loneliness of my sick-room, I get no scent, except it be, perhaps,
the perfume of warmed towels. Alas! God's satire weighs heavily on
me. The great Author of the universe, the Aristophanes of Heaven,
was bent on demonstrating, with crushing force, to me, the little,
earthly, German Aristophanes, how my wittiest sarcasms are only
pitiful attempts at jesting in comparison with His, and how miserably
I am beneath him in humor, in colossal mockery."

For our own part, we regard the paradoxical irreverence with which Heine
professes his theoretical reverence as pathological, as the diseased
exhibition of a predominant tendency urged into anomalous action by the
pressure of pain and mental privation--as a delirium of wit starved of
its proper nourishment. It is not for us to condemn, who have never had
the same burden laid on us; it is not for pigmies at their ease to
criticise the writhings of the Titan chained to the rock.

On one other point we must touch before quitting Heine's personal
history. There is a standing accusation against him in some quarters of
wanting political principle, of wishing to denationalize himself, and of
indulging in insults against his native country. Whatever ground may
exist for these accusations, that ground is not, so far as we see, to be
found in his writings. He may not have much faith in German revolutions
and revolutionists; experience, in his case as in that of others, may
have thrown his millennial anticipations into more distant perspective;
but we see no evidence that he has ever swerved from his attachment to
the principles of freedom, or written anything which to a philosophic
mind is incompatible with true patriotism. He has expressly denied the
report that h