istence.
There will always be those who hold that such careers as Byron's or
Heine's, such fitful careers, with their fierce tempests, their
ecstatic sunshine, their "awful brevity," are preferable to any serener
life, however long; and least of all may we pity Heine. With what scorn
would he look down upon our pity!

Heine's life has a peculiar value for the student of modern life, in
that it has what we may call an exemplary interest. For Heine made that
costly sacrificial experiment of which the old examples never suffice
us; the experiment which each new generation requires anew, in which
nature in her wasteful way insists on consuming the finest geniuses. As
Byron had attempted just before him, so Heine attempted to think and to
live without reserves, to compass the round of sentiment and sensation,
to touch the entire range of experience. Like Byron, he could not pass
through the fire; he fell, the flame licked him up. And yet, far more
truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not,
indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the
sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant.
They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they
give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real
passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book
of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says
of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a
man."

And Heine and Byron, in giving their lives for us, did what the
greatest poets and the strongest men have seldom done. Though they have
always suffered, yet for us these have rather toiled than suffered.
Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Goethe--what exalted, what demiurgic
creations have they bequeathed to us, what power to move, what beauty
to ponder with unapproachable longing! But these creations have an
awing beauty; they keep an unattainable distance and height. When we
consider the lives of these greatest spirits, we find them walking
apart in the fastnesses of the hills, pursuing arduous ways where few
or none may bear them company. Their paths gain upward upon the
heights; they gain so far and high that the tinge of that mountain
remoteness falls upon them--an airy distance, a deterring shadow; and
if ever their voices seem to say, "Follow us," they have not pointed
out the way.

But though Byron and Heine were thus