ox into the depths of the lake. It was a
pleasant scene, a clear imaginative microcosm; never was a distincter
picture in my mind than that of this fancied Killarney. The real
Killarney I saw many years after reading those histories of Peter
Parley, yet that first vivid picture did not vanish at the sight; the
fancied lake held its place against the reality; nay, even at this day,
I can call up the two pictures at will, the imagined and the real, and
compare the two--the scene of my early fancies with the humorous Celtic
saint standing beside the spring and snapping down the lid of his box
upon the tail of the last snake, on the one hand, and the broader
landscape of reality, in which there were no saints, but many Patricks.

But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became
reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him,
and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was
with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to
make that northward journey from which he was never to return.

How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home,
Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory
disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a
spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For
years, lingering in his cold city of the north, _verdammtes Hamburg_,
as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid
expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he
compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings
were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to
the south:

"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there,
and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not
good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to
be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly
forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the
golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate
not much kinder."

While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am
no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized
people--the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn
for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and
odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible