Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: HEINRICH HEINE A CENTENARY RETROSPECT " I Love Napoleon Bonaparte beyond all limit," wrote Heine, " up to the 18th Brumaire—when he betrayed freedom." On that day, when the legislature was forcibly closed, Heine was not, as his biographers commonly give us to understand, an unborn infant; he was a blue-eyed, chestnut-haired boy of nearly two years old. He came into the household of Diisseldorf, not in the year of Napoleon's " betrayal of freedom," but (13th December 1797) in that of the treaty of Campo-Formio, which gave to France the boundary of the Rhine. His contemporary in babyhood, born in the far South as Heine was in the far North, was afterwards an illustrious enlarger of the Napoleonic legend, " the Goethe of Politics "— so Heine named him—first President of the later Republic, Adolphe Thiers, who faced the spectre of Communism, which Heine, earlier than others, descried with alarm in the distance. When the dead poet lay at last freed from torture on his mattress- grave in February 1856, the finely-chiselled mask of marble, described by the friend of his closing days, was the face of a man whom a few more months would have carried into his sixtieth year. To be born with diverse souls is embarrassing, but it was Heine's distinction. It signifies that life is to be no steadfast progress, directed by some guiding light, but a wavering advance through a countlessseries of attractions passing into repulsions, and of repulsions transformed into attractions. To belong to the past and to the future, to be romanticist and realist, to mingle Mephistopheles with Faust, to be an aristocrat and a revolutionary, to be of a tribe and of a nation, to be a patriot and cosmopolitan, to be a monotheist through the emotions, a polytheist through the imagination, a pantheist through th... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.