r to wrap up coffee and snuff for old women, in a world where the
victorious proletariat triumphs. But that line of defence he voluntarily
abandons, knowing in his heart, as he said, that the present social
order could not endure, and that all beauty it preserved was not to be
counted against its horror.

It is at the end of the same preface that the well-known passage occurs,
thus translated by Matthew Arnold:

"I know not if I deserve that a laurel-wreath should one
day be laid on my coffin. Poetry, dearly as I have loved it,
has always been to me but a divine plaything. I have never
attached any great value to poetical fame; and I trouble myself
very little whether people praise my verses or blame them.
But lay on my coffin a _sword_; for I was a brave soldier in the
war of liberation of humanity."

The words appear strangely paradoxical. No one questions Heine's place
among the poets of the world. As a matter of fact, he was quite as
sensitive to criticism as other poets, and his courage was not more
conspicuous than most people's. But, nevertheless, those words contain
his last and true defence against the scorn of revolutionists, or men of
affairs, like Boerne. There is no need to make light of Boerne's
achievement; that also has its high place in the war of liberation. But,
powerless as the word may seem, there was in Heine's word a liberating
force that is felt in our battle to this day. He did not wield the axe
himself, but behind him has moved a mysterious figure, muffled in a
cloak--a Lictor following his footsteps with an axe--the deed of Heine's
thought.

V

THE BURNING BOOK

"How beggarly appear arguments before a defiant deed!" cried Walt
Whitman, as I quoted in the last essay. He was thinking, perhaps, of
Harper's Ferry and of John Brown hanging on the crab-apple tree, while
his soul went marching on. It is the lament of all writers and speakers
who are driven by inward compulsion to be something more than artists in
words, and who seek to jog the slow-pacing world more hurriedly forward.
How long had preachers, essayists, orators, and journalists argued
slavery round and round before the defiant deed crashed and settled it!
"Who hath believed our report?" the prophets have always cried, until
the arm of the Lord was revealed; and the melancholy of all prophetic
writers is mainly due to the conscious helplessness of their words. If
men would only listen to reason--if they wo