he occasion of a visit to Lueneburg and Hamburg in
the spring of 1823, and was haunted by her image during the summer
spent at Cuxhaven. Here Heine first saw the sea. In less exalted moods
he dallied with fisher maidens; he did not forget Amalie; but the
youthful grace and purity of Therese dominate most of the poems of
this summer. The return from the watering place gave Heine the title
_The Return Home_ for this collection of pieces which, when published
in 1826, was dedicated to Frau Varnhagen von Ense.

Uncle Salomon, to whom the _Tragedies_ had been affectionately
inscribed, was not displeased with the growing literary reputation of
his nephew. But he saw no sense in the idea that Heine already
entertained of settling in Paris. He insisted that the young man
should complete his studies; and so, in January, 1824, Heine once more
betook himself to Goettingen, where on the twenty-first of July, 1825,
he was duly promoted _Doctor utriusque Juris_. In the summer of 1824
he made the trip through the Hartz mountains which served as the basis
of _The Journey to the Hartz_; immediately before his promotion he
submitted to baptism in the Lutheran church as Christian Johann
Heinrich Heine.

Submission is the right word for this conversion. It was an act of
expediency such as other ambitious men found unavoidable in those
days; but Heine performed it in a spirit of bitterness caused not so
much by a sense of apostasy as by contempt for the conventional
Christianity that he now embraced. There can be no sharper contrast
than that presented by such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ and
sundry satirical pieces not included in this volume.

Two vacations at Norderney, where Heine renewed and deepened
acquaintance with his beloved North Sea, not very resolute attempts to
take up the practice of law in Hamburg, a trip to London, vain hopes
of a professorship in Munich, a sojourn in Italy, vacillations between
Hamburg, Berlin, and the North Sea, complete the narrative of Heine's
movements to the end of the first period of his life. He was now Heine
the writer: poet, journalist, and novelist. _The Journey to the
Hartz_, first published in a magazine, _Der Gesellschafter_, in
January and February, 1826, was issued in May of that year by Campe in
Hamburg, as the first volume of _Pictures of Travel_, beginning with
the poems of _The Return Home_ and concluding with the first group of
hymns to the North Sea, written at Norderney in