foolish
denkmal (one of the worst in all denkmal-ridden Germany), and the memory
of the singer whom the Hohenzollern family pride forbids honor in his
native place, is immortal in its presence.

On the way back to their hotel, March made some reflections upon the open
neglect, throughout Germany, of the greatest German lyrist, by which the
poet might have profited if he had been present. He contended that it was
not altogether an effect of Hohenzollern pride, which could not suffer a
joke or two from the arch-humorist; but that Heine had said things of
Germany herself which Germans might well have found unpardonable. He
concluded that it would not do to be perfectly frank with one's own
country. Though, to be sure, there would always be the question whether
the Jew-born Heine had even a step-fatherland in the Germany he loved so
tenderly and mocked so pitilessly. He had to own that if he were a negro
poet he would not feel bound to measure terms in speaking of America, and
he would not feel that his fame was in her keeping.

Upon the whole he blamed Heine less than Germany and he accused her of
taking a shabby revenge, in trying to forget him; in the heat of his
resentment that there should be no record of Heine in the city where he
was born, March came near ignoring himself the fact that the poet
Freiligrath was also born there. As for the famous Dusseldorf school of
painting, which once filled the world with the worst art, he rejoiced
that it was now so dead, and he grudged the glance which the beauty of
the new Art Academy extorted from him. It is in the French taste, and is
so far a monument to the continuance in one sort of that French
supremacy, of which in another sort another denkmal celebrates the
overthrow. Dusseldorf is not content with the denkmal of the Kaiser on
horseback, with the two Victories for grooms; there is a second, which
the Marches found when they strolled out again late in the afternoon. It
is in the lovely park which lies in the heart of the city, and they felt
in its presence the only emotion of sympathy which the many patriotic
monuments of Germany awakened in them. It had dignity and repose, which
these never had elsewhere; but it was perhaps not so much for the dying
warrior and the pitying lion of the sculpture that their hearts were
moved as for the gentle and mournful humanity of the inscription, which
dropped into equivalent English verse in March's note-book:

Fame was enough fo