ly remarkable miserableness of
nature, that I am convinced they would get at the Exhibition the grand
medal for pain and misery." He read all the medical books which treated
of his complaint. "But," said he to some one who found him thus engaged,
"what good this reading is to do me I don't know, except that it will
qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on
earth about diseases of the spinal marrow." What a matter of grim
seriousness are our own ailments to most of us! yet with this gayety
Heine treated his to the end. That end, so long in coming, came at last.
Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight. By
his will he forbade that his remains should be transported to Germany.
He lies buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, at Paris.

His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered
at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of
literature, and Heine was a born man of letters. Even in his favorite
France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished,
though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us,
read them. He thought things were tending there to the triumph of
communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross
and narrow in communism was very repulsive. "It is all of no use," he
cried on his death-bed, "the future belongs to our enemies, the
Communists, and Louis Napoleon[151] is their John the Baptist." "And
yet,"--he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so
full of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French
people,--"do not believe that God lets all this go forward merely as a
grand comedy. Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows
better than they do, that a time will come when they will learn to
believe in him." After 1831, his hopes of soon upsetting the German
Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more
truly literary, character.

It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to
literature. To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life
filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister. He touched all the
great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed
the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a
wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares
most to see them, and here