, the personal God, the dear old Bible,
a life beyond the grave."

Fascinated by his talk, which seemed to play like lightning round a
cliff at midnight, revealing not only measureless heights and
soundless depths, but the greasy wrappings and refuse bottles of a
picnic, the listener had an intuition that Heine's mind did indeed,
as he claimed, reflect or rather refract the All. Only not sublimely
blurred as in Spinoza's, but specifically colored and infinitely
interrelated, so that he might pass from the sublime to the ridiculous
with an equal sense of its value in the cosmic scheme. It was the
Jewish artist's proclamation of the Unity, the humorist's "Hear, O
Israel."

"Will it never end, this battle of Jew and Greek?" he said, half to
himself, so that she did not know whether he meant it personally or
generally. Then, as she tore herself away, "I fear I have shocked
you," he said tenderly. "But one thing I have never blasphemed--Life.
Is not enjoyment an implicit prayer, a latent grace? After all, God is
our Father, not our drill-master. He is not so dull and solemn as the
parsons make out. He made the kitten to chase its tail and my Nonotte
to laugh and dance. Come again, dear child, for my friends have grown
used to my dying, and expect me to die for ever--an inverted
immortality. But one day they will find the puppet-show shut up and
the jester packed in his box. Good-bye. God bless you, little Lucy,
God bless you."

The puppet-show was shut up sooner than he expected; but the jester
had kept his most wonderful _mot_ for the last.

"_Dieu me pardonnera_," he said. "_C'est son metier._"

THE PEOPLE'S SAVIOUR

I

"Der Bahn, der kuehnen, folgen wir,
Die uns gefuehrt Lassalle."

Such is the Marseillaise the Social Democrats of Germany sing, as they
troop out when the police break up their meetings.

This Lassalle, whose bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in
the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph
"Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular
manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah--the
Saviour of the People.

II

But no man is a hero to his valet or his relatives, and on the spring
morning when Lassalle stood at the parting of the ways--where the
Thinker's path debouched on the Fighter's--his brother-in-law from
Prague, being in Berlin on business, took the opportunity of
remonstrating.

"I can't un