the successors of the _idees
Napoleoniennes_. The thirteen-year-old pupil of the gymnasium saw the
Emperor in the year 1811, and then again in May 1812; and later on in
the 'Book Legrand' of the 'Travel Pictures' he strikes up the following
dithyrambic, which, as is always the case with Heine where the great
Caesar is concerned, tones forth pure and full, with genuine poetic
swing, without those dissonances in which his inmost feelings often
flow. "What feelings came over me," he exclaims, "when I saw him
himself, with my own highly favored eyes, him himself, Hosanna, the
Emperor! It was in the avenue of the Court garden in Duesseldorf. As I
pushed myself through the gaping people, I thought of his deeds and his
battles, and my heart beat the general march--and nevertheless, I
thought at the same time of the police regulation that no one under a
penalty of five thalers should ride through the middle of the avenue.
And the Emperor rode quietly through the middle of the avenue; no
policeman opposed him. Behind him, his suite rode proudly on snorting
horses and loaded with gold and jewels, the trumpets sounded, and the
people shouted with a thousand voices, 'Long live the Emperor!'" To this
enthusiasm for Napoleon, Heine not long afterward gave a poetic setting
in the ballad 'The Two Grenadiers.'...

The Napoleonic remembrances of his youth, which retained that unfading
freshness and enthusiasm that are wont to belong to all youthful
remembrances, were of vital influence upon Heine's later position in
literature; they formed a balance over against the romantic tendency,
and hindered him from being drawn into it. Precisely in that epoch when
the beautiful patriotism of the Wars of Liberation went over into the
weaker feeling of the time of the restoration, and romanticism, grown
over-devout, in part abandoned itself to externals, in part became a
centre of reactionary efforts, Heine let this Napoleonic lightning play
on the sultry heavens of literature, in the most daring opposition to
the ruling disposition of the time and a school of poetry from which he
himself had proceeded; while he declared war upon its followers. However
greatly he imperiled his reputation as a German patriot through these
hosannas offered to the hereditary enemy, just as little was it to be
construed amiss that the remembrance of historical achievements, and of
those principles of the Revolution which even the Napoleonic despotism
must represent, we