glorious ideals of the French Revolution, the official reaction against these ideals, the cult of the bizarre and the infinite yearning of Romanticism, and the Hellenism of the æsthetic movement. Let us now turn to the poet's life, and examine the part played by environment, race, and parentage in moulding his character.

Heine was born in Düsseldorf on December 1797, and not as is currently supposed in 1799.

The Catholic Rhineland, in which Düsseldorf is situated, rebelled more than almost any other district in Germany against the despotism of the Prussian bureaucracy; it possessed an almost southern joie de vivre, and only naturally exhibited a distinct inclination to the Catholicism of the Romanticists, all of which characteristics in a greater or less degree are to be found in Heine.

Further, Heine was a Jew, possessing, in consequence, an hereditary tendency to gravitate to the extreme left wing both of thought and of politics, while the inborn Judenschmerz in his heart was aggravated by the anti-Semitic reaction which followed the benevolent tolerance of Napoleon.

The poet's father, Samson Heine, was an easy-going, æsthetic nonentity in moderate circumstances, who does not appear to have exercised any serious influence on the child's development. This was accomplished by the mother, née von Geldern, a cultured and strong-minded woman, and a Voltairean by belief, who did her best to foster and stimulate her son's youthful intelligence. The favourite authors of the young Heine were Cervantes, Sterne, and Swift. Of contemporaries, the two men who exercised any real influence were the Emperor Napoleon, and Byron, "the kingly man" and the aristocratic revolutionary. Napoleon in particular was the god of his boyish adoration. This Napoleonic enthusiasm was largely fostered by Heine's friendship with a grenadier drummer of the French army named Le Grand, while it reached its climax when he beheld with his own eyes the beatific vision of the Emperor himself riding on his beautiful white palfrey through the Hofgarten Allee at Düsseldorf, in splendid defiance of the police regulations, which forbade such riding under a penalty of five thalers.

This worship of the Emperor, moreover, resulted in the wonderful poem called "The Grenadiers," written at the age of eighteen. The swing and power of the poem have made it classic, especially the great final stanza beginning:

"Denn reitet mein Kaiser wohl über mein Grab."

Heine received his early education at a Jesuit monastery. The first event of any moment in his life, however, is his calf-love for Josepha, or Sefchen, the executioner's daughter, a weird fantastic beauty of fifteen, with large dark eyes and blood-red hair. Josepha was the inspiration of the juvenile Dream Pictures incorporated subsequently in the Book of Songs, and exhibiting a genuine power and an even more genuine promise.

In 1816 Heine was sent into the office of Solomon Heine, his millionaire uncle of Hamburg.

He seems to have been singularly destitute of the financial genius of his race, and the business career proved from the outset a fiasco. The real key, however, to the three years spent in Hamburg is supplied not by Money, but by Love. Having served his apprenticeship in Düsseldorf with his calf-attachment to the executioner's daughter, Heine proceeded straightway to a grande passion for his uncle's pretty daughter Amalie. His love was not reciprocated, and in 1821 the beauteous Amalie married a wealthy landowner of Königsberg. This Amalie incident was one of the most important in Heine's life, and is largely responsible for his early cynicism. He was disillusioned with a vengeance, and could now with his own eyes inspect the flimsy material of which "Love's Young Dream" is wove. Though, however, a great personal blow, this abortive passion is also to be regarded as an invaluable æsthetic asset. The poet of necessity is bound to write of his own personal impressions and experiences; and it is obvious that the intenser are these experiences, the more vital will be his poetry. If Heine's love for Amalie was the accursed flame that seared his soul, it was also the sacred fire that kindled his inspiration, and it is to Amalie that we owe not only a great part of the Book of Songs, but also much which is characteristic of Heine's subsequent life-outlook.

In 1819, probably because Heine had given convincing proofs of his business inefficiency, it was decided that he should go to Bonn to study law. He neglected his studies, and it was not long before he fell foul of the authorities, owing to his anticipation in the proceedings of the Burschenschaften or student political unions.

In 1820 Heine left Bonn for Göttingen. At Göttingen his career was brief but thrilling, and he was rusticated after a few months on account of a proposed duel with an impertinent junker.

Transferring his quarters to Berlin, he now spent by far the most enjoyable period of his university career. The intellectual atmosphere of Berlin was quicker and less pedantic than that of Göttingen, and he plunged into his studies with considerable energy.

In 1821 Heine published the first volume of his poems, containing the Dream Pictures, some miscellaneous juvenile poems, and the Lyrisches Intermezzo, which was inspired by the banker's, in the same way that the Dream Pictures had been inspired by the executioner's, daughter.

The book was an immediate success, how great may be gauged by the numerous parodies and imitations which it almost instantaneously evoked. It was at this period that he wrote the two romantic tragedies of Ratcliff and Almansor. Both failures and devoid of much merit, they served none the less useful purpose of advertising his fame.

In 1823 we see an echo of his passion for Amalie in his love for his younger cousin Therese, who seems in many respects to have been a replica of her elder sister. Therese, however, refused to be anything more than a cousin to him, and his heart was still further embittered as is shown by the poem:

"Wer zum erstenmale liebt
Sei's auch glücklos ist ein Gott
Aber wer zum zweitenmale
Glücklos liebt, er ist ein Narr
Ich, ein solcher Narr, ich liebe
Wieder ohne Gegenliebe;
Sonne, Mond und Sterne lachen
Und ich lache mit und sterbe."

In 1824 he decided to prosecute his studies for his doctorial degree with greater seriousness, and leaving behind him the distractions of the capital, went back once more to the more staid and prosaic Göttingen.

Heine intended not merely to take a degree for the sake of ornament, but also to practise seriously as a lawyer. How serious were these intentions may be seen from the fact that he went to the length of paying in advance the heavy entrance fee which the legal profession then exacted from Jews, and became baptized "as a Protestant and a Lutheran to boot" on June 28, 1825.

Heine's conversion has frequently been criticised with superfluous harshness. Let him, however, explain his position for himself:

"At that time I myself was still a god, and none of the positive religions had more value for me than another; I could only wear their uniforms as a matter of courtesy, on the same principle that the Emperor of Russia dresses himself up as an officer of the Prussian Guard when he honours his imperial cousin with a visit to Potsdam."

After all, his apostasy brought with it its own punishment, not only in its deep-felt shame, but in the fact that he eventually threw up law for literature, and thus rendered so great a sacrifice of racial loyalty and his own self-respect consummately futile. After selling