ish Titan, the wings of
whose genius were so strong that he soared as high as the sun, in spite
of the hundred-weight of Dutch cheeses that hung on his legs." Speaking
of Borne's dislike to the calm creations of the true artist, he says, "He
was like a child which, insensible to the glowing significance of a Greek
statue, only touches the marble and complains of cold."

The most poetic and specifically humorous of Heine's prose writings are
the "Reisebilder." The comparison with Sterne is inevitable here; but
Heine does not suffer from it, for if he falls below Sterne in raciness
of humor, he is far above him in poetic sensibility and in reach and
variety of thought. Heine's humor is never persistent, it never flows on
long in easy gayety and drollery; where it is not swelled by the tide of
poetic feeling, it is continually dashing down the precipice of a
witticism. It is not broad and unctuous; it is aerial and sprite-like, a
momentary resting-place between his poetry and his wit. In the
"Reisebilder" he runs through the whole gamut of his powers, and gives us
every hue of thought, from the wildly droll and fantastic to the sombre
and the terrible. Here is a passage almost Dantesque in conception:

"Alas! one ought in truth to write against no one in this world.
Each of us is sick enough in this great lazaretto, and many a
polemical writing reminds me involuntarily of a revolting quarrel, in
a little hospital at Cracow, of which I chanced to be a witness, and
where it was horrible to hear how the patients mockingly reproached
each other with their infirmities: how one who was wasted by
consumption jeered at another who was bloated by dropsy; how one
laughed at another's cancer in the nose, and this one again at his
neighbor's locked-jaw or squint, until at last the delirious
fever-patient sprang out of bed and tore away the coverings from the
wounded bodies of his companions, and nothing was to be seen but
hideous misery and mutilation."

And how fine is the transition in the very next chapter, where, after
quoting the Homeric description of the feasting gods, he says:

"Then suddenly approached, panting, a pale Jew, with drops of blood
on his brow, with a crown of thorns on his head, and a great cross
laid on his shoulders; and he threw the cross on the high table of
the gods, so that the golden cups tottered, and the gods became dumb
and pal