elds for home
consumption, she has provided little for the palate of other lands. All
honor to her for the still greater things she has done for us! She has
fought the hardest fight for freedom of thought, has produced the
grandest inventions, has made magnificent contributions to science, has
given us some of the divinest poetry, and quite the divinest music in the
world. No one reveres and treasures the products of the German mind more
than we do. To say that that mind is not fertile in wit is only like
saying that excellent wheat land is not rich pasture; to say that we do
not enjoy German facetiousness is no more than to say that, though the
horse is the finest of quadrupeds, we do not like him to lay his hoof
playfully on our shoulder. Still, as we have noticed that the pointless
puns and stupid jocularity of the boy may ultimately be developed into
the epigrammatic brilliancy and polished playfulness of the man; as we
believe that racy wit and chastened delicate humor are inevitably the
results of invigorated and refined mental activity, we can also believe
that Germany will, one day, yield a crop of wits and humorists.

Perhaps there is already an earnest of that future crop in the existence
of Heinrich Heine, a German born with the present century, who, to
Teutonic imagination, sensibility, and humor, adds an amount of _esprit_
that would make him brilliant among the most brilliant of Frenchmen.
True, this unique German wit is half a Hebrew; but he and his ancestors
spent their youth in German air, and were reared on _Wurst_ and
_Sauerkraut_, so that he is as much a German as a pheasant is an English
bird, or a potato an Irish vegetable. But whatever else he may be, Heine
is one of the most remarkable men of this age: no echo, but a real voice,
and therefore, like all genuine things in this world, worth studying; a
surpassing lyric poet, who has uttered our feelings for us in delicious
song; a humorist, who touches leaden folly with the magic wand of his
fancy, and transmutes it into the fine gold of art--who sheds his sunny
smile on human tears, and makes them a beauteous rainbow on the cloudy
background of life; a wit, who holds in his mighty hand the most
scorching lightnings of satire; an artist in prose literature, who has
shown even more completely than Goethe the possibilities of German prose;
and--in spite of all charges against him, true as well as false--a lover
of freedom, who has spoken wise and