family? Yes. Kill--murder!'"

In political matters Heine, like all men whose intellect and taste
predominate too far over their impulses to allow of their becoming
partisans, is offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the
one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the
other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with
"that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm,
which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of
generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had
so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from
the top of a mast into the sea, crying, "_I die for General Jackson_!"

"But thou liest, Brutus, thou liest, Cassius, and thou, too, liest,
Asinius, in maintaining that my ridicule attacks those ideas which
are the precious acquisition of Humanity, and for which I myself have
so striven and suffered. No! for the very reason that those ideas
constantly hover before the poet in glorious splendor and majesty, he
is the more irresistibly overcome by laughter when he sees how
rudely, awkwardly, and clumsily those ideas are seized and mirrored
in the contracted minds of contemporaries. . . . There are mirrors
which have so rough a surface that even an Apollo reflected in them
becomes a caricature, and excites our laughter. _But we laugh then
only at the caricature_, _not at the god_."

For the rest, why should we demand of Heine that he should be a hero, a
patriot, a solemn prophet, any more than we should demand of a gazelle
that it should draw well in harness? Nature has not made him of her
sterner stuff--not of iron and adamant, but of pollen of flowers, the
juice of the grape, and Puck's mischievous brain, plenteously mixing also
the dews of kindly affection and the gold-dust of noble thoughts. It is,
after all, a _tribute_ which his enemies pay him when they utter their
bitterest dictum, namely, that he is "_nur Dichter_"--only a poet. Let
us accept this point of view for the present, and, leaving all
consideration of him as a man, look at him simply as a poet and literary
artist.

Heine is essentially a lyric poet. The finest products of his genius are

"Short swallow flights of song that dip
Their wings in tears, and skim away;"

and they are so emphatically songs that, in reading them, we feel as if
each m