n 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
brave words on behalf of his fellow-men. He is, moreover, a suffering
man, who, with all the highly wrought sensibility of genius, has to
endure terrible physical ills; and as such he calls forth more than an
intellectual interest. It is true, alas! that there is a heavy weight
in the other scale--that Heine's magnificent powers have often served
only to give electric force to the expression of debased feeling, so
that his works are no Phidian statue of gold, and ivory, and gems, but
have not a little brass, and iron, and miry clay mingled with the
precious metal. The audacity of his occasional coarseness and
personality is unparalleled in contemporary literature, and has hardly
been exceeded by the license of former days. Yet, when all coarseness,
all scurrility, all Mephistophelean contempt for the reverent feelings
of other men, is removed, there will be a plenteous remainder of
exquisite poetry, of wit, humor and just thought. It is apparently too
often a congenial task to write severe words about the transgressions
committed by men of genius, especially when the censor has the
advantage of being himself a man of _no_ genius, so that those
transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; _he_, forsooth, never
lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse
allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the
temptation that lies in transcendent power....

In Heine's hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull,
becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic,
brilliant; it is German in an _allotropic_ condition. No dreary,
labyrinthine sentences in which you find "no end in wandering mazes
lost;" no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no
digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and
clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision,
all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong