ion; they were isolated
martyrs to their national relations; and, besides, great geniuses do
not belong to the particular land of their birth: they scarcely
belong to this earth, the Golgotha of their sufferings. The
mass--the English blockheads, God forgive me!--are hateful to me in
my inmost soul; and I often regard them not at all as my fellow-men,
but as miserable automata--machines, whose motive power is egoism.
In these moods, it seems to me as if I heard the whizzing wheelwork
by which they think, feel, reckon, digest, and pray: their praying,
their mechanical Anglican church-going, with the gilt Prayer-book
under their arms, their stupid, tiresome Sunday, their awkward piety,
is most of all odious to me. I am firmly convinced that a
blaspheming Frenchman is a more pleasing sight for the Divinity than
a praying Englishman."

On his return from England Heine was employed at Munich in editing the
_Allgemeinen Politischen Annalen_, but in 1830 he was again in the north,
and the news of the July Revolution surprised him on the island of
Heligoland. He has given us a graphic picture of his democratic
enthusiasm in those days in some letters, apparently written from
Heligoland, which he has inserted in his book on Borne. We quote some
passages, not only for their biographic interest as showing a phase of
Heine's mental history, but because they are a specimen of his power in
that kind of dithyrambic writing which, in less masterly hands, easily
becomes ridiculous:

"The thick packet of newspapers arrived from the Continent with these
warm, glowing-hot tidings. They were sunbeams wrapped up in
packing-paper, and they inflamed my soul till it burst into the
wildest conflagration. . . . It is all like a dream to me; especially
the name Lafayette sounds to me like a legend out of my earliest
childhood. Does he really sit again on horseback, commanding the
National Guard? I almost fear it may not be true, for it is in
print. I will myself go to Paris, to be convinced of it with my
bodily eyes. . . . It must be splendid, when he rides through the
street, the citizen of two worlds, the godlike old man, with his
silver locks streaming down his sacred shoulder. . . . He greets,
with his dear old eyes, the grandchildren of those who once fought
with him for freedom and equality. . . . It is now sixty years since