on the music rack of the piano, in the school-books, in the
slender libraries of minor officers and young clerks. However difficult
it may be to compile an _editio castigata_ of his poems, every age,
every generation has selected from among them that which has delighted
it. Citations from Heine, winged words in verse and prose, buzz through
the air of the century like a swarm of insects: splendid butterflies
with gayly glistening wings, beautiful day moths and ghostly night
moths, tormenting gnats, and bees armed with evil stings. Heine's works
are canonical books for the intellectual, who season their judgments
with citations from this poet, model their conversation on his style,
interpret him, expand the germ cell of his wit to a whole fabric of
clever developments. Even if he is not a companion on the way through
life, like great German poets, and smaller Brahmins who for every day of
our house-and-life calendar give us an aphorism on the road, there are
nevertheless, in the lives of most modern men, moods with which Heine's
verse harmonize with wondrous sympathy; moments in which the intimacy
with this poet is greater than the friendship, even if this be of longer
duration, with our classic poets.

It is apparently idle to attempt to say anything new of so much
discussed a singer of modern times, since testimony favorable and
unfavorable has been drained to exhaustion by friend and foe. Who does
not know Heine,--or rather, who does not believe that he knows him? for,
as is immediately to be added, acquaintance with this poet extends
really only to a few of his songs, and to the complete picture which is
delivered over ready-made from one history of literature into another.
Nothing, however, is more perilous and more fatal than literary
tradition! Not merely decrees and laws pass along by inheritance, like a
constitutional infirmity, but literary judgments too. They form at last
a subject of instruction like any other; a dead piece of furniture in
the spiritual housekeeping, which, like everything that has been
learned, is set as completed to one side. We know enough of this sort of
fixed pictures, which at last pass along onward as the fixed ideas of a
whole epoch, until a later unprejudiced investigation dissolves this
rigid-grown wisdom, sets it to flowing, and forms out of a new mixture
of its elements a new and more truthful portrait.

It is not to be affirmed however that Heine's picture, as it stands
fixed an