German, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy from
the first line of his I had seen.

This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author
that I have known. Where or when I first acquainted myself with his most
fascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some article
of the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given in
English and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessed
my soul. I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great good
luck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books. He was a
bookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848
sent to us in great numbers. He was a Hanoverian, and his accent was
then, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the accepted
pronunciation. But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get at
Heine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate the
friendship of that bookbinder in every way. I dare say he was glad of
mine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had no
companionship outside of his own family. I clothed him in all the
romantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which new
took the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections. He was a
very quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of our
author's humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember very
well the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant,
and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came to
some passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew had
unpacked all the insult of his soul.

We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almost
word by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was
rather scanty at the best, and was not literary. As for the grammar, I
was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from other
sources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a
conjugation. As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home to
the books, and worked away at them until supper. Then my bookbinder and
I met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on the
table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we read
till we were both tired out.

The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flat
ca