e 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 Liberation War of humanity."[136]

Heine had his full share of love of fame, and cared quite as much as his
brethren of the _genus irritabile_ whether people praised his verses or
blamed them. And he was very little of a hero. Posterity will certainly
decorate his tomb with the emblem of the laurel rather than with the
emblem of the sword. Still, for his contemporaries, for us, for the
Europe of the present century, he is significant chiefly for the reason
which he himself in the words just quoted assigns. He is significant
because he was, if not pre-eminently a brave, yet a brilliant, a most
effective soldier in the Liberation War of humanity.

To ascertain the master-current in the literature of an epoch, and to
distinguish this from all minor currents, is one of the critic's highest
functions; in discharging it he shows how far he possesses the most
indispensable quality of his office,--justness of spirit. The living
writer who has done most to make England acquainted with German authors,
a man of genius, but to whom precisely this one quality of justness of
spirit is perhaps wanting,--I mean Mr. Carlyle,--seems to me in the
result of his labors on German literature to afford a proof how very
necessary to the critic this quality is. Mr. Carlyle has spoken
admirably of Goethe; but then Goethe stands before all men's eyes, the
manifest centre of German literature; and from this central source many
rivers flow. Which of these rivers is the main stream? which of the
courses of spirit which we see active in Goethe is the course which will
most influence the future, and attract and be continued by the most
powerful of Goethe's successors?--that is the question. Mr. Carlyle
attaches, it seems to me, far too much importance to the romantic school
of Germany,--Tieck, Novalis, Jean Paul Richter,[137]--and gives to these
writers, really gifted as two, at any rate, of them are, an undue
prominence. These writers, and others with aims and a general tendency
the same as theirs, are not the real inheritors and continuators of
Goethe's power; the current of their activity is not the main current of
German literature after Goethe. Far more in Heine's works flows this
main current; Heine, far more than Tieck or Jean Paul Ric