if it had been in rhyme; for although an interpreter of
poetry undeniably has the difficulties of form to struggle with, yet
there is, on the other hand, an inspiration and waft of feeling in the
metre which lends him wings and helps him on. If Mr. Stern does not
encumber his style with a betrayal of the difficulties he has got
over--if he does not give us pedantry and double-epithets, so common
in vulgar renderings from the German--he certainly shows no timidity
in turning the polished familiarity of Heine's prose into our
commonest vernacular. "What lots of pleasure I found on my arrival;"
"for the men, lots of patience:" trivialities of expression like these
are not rare in his version. If they are not quite what Heine would
have written if he had been writing in English, at least the fault
of familiarity is better than the fault of hardness; and these
translations are never at all hard or uncomfortable. When we add that
Mr. Stern gives us an index without showing what works the extracts
are taken from, and that he gives us an article on Heine without any
mention that we can discover of Heine's wife, we have vented about all
the objections we can make to this welcome publication; and they are
very few to find in a collection of hundreds of "scintillations."

The pleasures that remain for the reader are manifold: so liberally
and judiciously are the extracts chosen that we get a complete exhibit
of Heine's mind on nearly all the topics he occupied himself about. We
have his views on French and German politicians; on French, German and
English authors; on art and poetry; on his own soul and character; on
religion; besides a great deal of that persiflage, the most exquisite
persiflage surely that ever was heard, which flutters clear away from
the regions of sense and information, yet which only a man of sense
and information could have uttered.

Heine came to Paris in 1831, and saw all the sights and found
everything "charming." His wit is a little cheap, perhaps, when he
calls the Senate Chamber at the Luxembourg "the necropolis in which
the mummies of perjury are embalmed;" at least it becomes tiresome to
hear his constant disparagement of the politics which he chose to live
under, and which protected him so agreeably; but he is his own keen
self where he observes that the signs of the revolution of 1830,
what he calls the legend of _liberte, egalite, fraternite_ at the
street-corners, had "already been wiped away."