pleasure! For
he surfeited himself somewhat with this experience; he knew its dangers
perfectly well, but what ardent young man is deterred by knowing the
danger? We bite at the hook just the same, as M. Renan says:
_L'hamecon est evident, et neanmoins on y a mordu, on y mordra
toujours_. And with all his love of delicacy, with all his
distinction of spirit, he also relished harsh things. Sharp aliments,
rank flavors, draining ecstasies that mingle the last drop of pleasure
with pain and faintness, seemed necessary to complete the round of this
man's life--of Heine the singer, Heine the man of all his time in whom
the delicate blossoms of poetry were most fragrant. No poet could
better deal than he with the exquisite joyances of the heart and soul;
and he well knew that this bloom does not gather upon the fruit of
coarse experience. He knew that the most delicate vintage is yielded to
the gentle pressure. But with this he was not content. He crushed the
grape harshly; he made it yield up its harsher juices; the flavors of
rind and seed are expressed in the wine of his life, and mingle with
the cup that he pours out.

And his life was spent as wine is poured upon the ground. Heine ended
where the ascetics began, in pain, privation, mortification of the
flesh; and it was a mortification that had not even the consolation of
being the sufferer's own choice, for it was involuntary. Better for him
would it have been had he gone out to dwell in the wilderness, as St.
Jerome left the Paris of his day, and retired into the desert of
Chalcis. For a strange penalty was to be his--one of which the joyous
apostle of pleasure could hardly have dreamed before the blow fell. A
paralytic touch converted the man of pleasure into a man of pain, his
bed a living tomb. No more for ever, for Heine, was there to be any
reinstatement of the flesh.

This dark closing period of Heine's life has a fascination about it; it
holds the attention like the background of a Rembrandt etching, with
its dimly-seen forms that appear to stir in the gloom, ghostly,
half-alive; such a contrast there is between his gloomy close and the
bright projection of his earlier career. Shall we call his life a
failure as regards himself, his personal success and happiness? Upon
that point we may not pronounce too confidently. He would have chosen
it had the choice been offered him with full knowledge of the
alternatives; he would have preferred it to any commonplace ex