and weary, the poet was taking his last walk on the
boulevards, while the mob of the revolution surged in the streets of
Paris. Half blind, half paralyzed, leaning heavily on his cane, he
sought to extricate himself from the clamorous crowd, and finally found
refuge in the Louvre, almost empty during the days of excitement. With
difficulty he dragged himself to the hall of the gods and goddesses of
antiquity, and suddenly came face to face with the ideal of beauty, the
smiling, witching Venus of Milo, whose charms have defied time and
mutilation. Surprised, moved, almost terrified, he reeled to a chair,
tears, hot and bitter, coursing down his cheeks. A smile was hovering on
the beautiful lips of the goddess, parted as if by living breath, and at
her feet a luckless victim was writhing. A single moment revealed a
world of misery. Driven by a consciousness of his fate, Heine wrote in
his "Confessions": "In May of last year I was forced to take to my bed,
and since then I have not risen. I confess frankly that meanwhile a
great change has taken place in me. I no longer am a fat Hellenist, the
freest man since Goethe, a jolly, somewhat corpulent Hellenist, with a
contemptuous smile for lean Jews--I am only a poor Jew, sick unto death,
a picture of gaunt misery, an unhappy being."

This startling change was coincident with the first symptoms of his
disease, and kept pace with it. The pent-up forces of faith pressed to
his bedside; religious conversations, readings from the Bible,
reminiscences of his youth, of his Jewish friends, filled his time
almost entirely. Alfred Meissner has culled many interesting data from
his conversations with the poet. For instance, on one occasion Heine
breaks out with:[104]

"Queer people this! Downtrodden for thousands of years, weeping always,
suffering always, abandoned always by its God, yet clinging to Him
tenaciously, loyally, as no other under the sun. Oh, if martyrdom,
patience, and faith in despite of trial, can confer a patent of
nobility, then this people is noble beyond many another.--It would have
been absurd and petty, if, as people accuse me, I had been ashamed of
being a Jew. Yet it were equally ludicrous for me to call myself a
Jew.--As I instinctively hold up to unending scorn whatever is evil,
timeworn, absurd, false, and ludicrous, so my nature leads me to
appreciate the sublime, to admire what is great, and to extol every
living force." Heine had spoken so much with deep