fate for a Persian poet that
he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O
Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"

As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with
"Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a
land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in
1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he
calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible
chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and
where ... the mob exercises its coarse dominion!" Meanwhile, as he
tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think
that I was better than other people."

Heine reached Paris in his thirty-first year; and never was the city
better appreciated and enjoyed than by this young wanderer during the
earlier time of his residence there. Everything in it pleased him: the
intellectual life, the interest in ideas, not less than the gayety and
charm. But he found much pleasure in the courtesy of Parisian manners.
Parisian manners were then, as even now, distinguishable from Prussian
by the careful observer. "Sweet pineapple odors of politeness!" he
says, "how beneficially didst thou console my sick spirit, which had
swallowed down in Germany so much tobacco vapor!... Like the melodies
of Rossini did the pretty phrases of apology of a Frenchman sound in my
ear, who had gently pushed me in the street on the day of my arrival. I
was almost frightened at such sweet politeness--I who had been
accustomed to boorish German knocks in the ribs without any apology at
all." If any one jostled Heine roughly in the street, and made no
apology, he would say, "I knew that that man was one of my
countrymen."[6]

[6] I quote from the translations in Stigand's "Life."

But Paris is somewhat more than a city of pleasure; it is a city of
opportunity. To many Americans it is a stumbling-block, to many
Englishmen foolishness; but Heine was one of the true children of
Paris, though wandering at first far from the centre, and he found
fitting work there. They were busy as well as joyous years, those that
he first spent in that bright capital. O Paris, city of opportunity,
how many other of thy children are still wandering far from the centre!
Some of them live upon the sierras of Patagonia, some in the stonier
streets of Askelon, some inhabit caves in the deserts