of Maceria.
Living an anchorite's life in German villages, in Pacific colonies, on
Cape Cod or Kerguelen's Land, the delicate French spirit wastes itself
away. And yet some of these exiles have found their way to that centre
of blithe intellectual activity.

Heine was such a one; he spent in Paris the most productive and happy
period of his life, the bright interval between his cloudy morning and
the shadows that were to gather around him before their time; and how
he glowed in the warmth and light of the capital! And while he carried
his pleasures to excess, yet he did not go pleasuring like the vulgar.
In a valid sense his very extravagances had an intelligible principle
in them; one might say that he dissipated himself upon ethical grounds.
Yet his were the reasons of a poetic, not of an analytic thinker. The
popular religion, he said, has dishonored the flesh; let us restore it
to honor. To restore joyousness to modern life, something of the
antique innocence to pleasure, to make it reputable as well as
delightful, to readjust the conscience of a community which looked upon
pleasure as essentially wrong, and yet pursued it, so thinking, at the
expense of its conscience, to relieve pleasure somewhat from the ban,
to augment, in a word, the permitted happiness of life--that was
Heine's aim; that was what he understood by his favorite doctrine of
restoring the flesh to honor--_la rehabilitation de la chair_.

Do you call that an easy creed, a comfortable practice? I will not deny
it, but do not let us lose the distinction, the trait by which Heine's
doctrine was discriminated from that of some other easy-going apostles.
Heine was intellectually sincere; he had a genuine purpose; he did not
go to Paris, for instance, as some of our missionaries have gone of
late years to Florence and Madrid, with commissions to labor among the
"nominal Christians," as they call the Catholic residents of those
comfortable capitals, to convert them to the true Christianity of
American Protestantism. No; Heine had too much directness, too much
intellectual verity for a situation of that sort: his mistakes were
honest mistakes, and he paid an honest penalty for them.

And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body
to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable
purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I
am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be muc