The “North Sea” belongs to my last poems, and you can see there what new keys I touch, and on what new lines I move along. Prose receives me in her wide arms, and in the next volume of my “Reisebilder” you will find in prose much that is mad, bitter, offensive, angry, and very polemical. Times are really too bad (1826), and whoever has strength, freedom, and boldness has also the duty seriously to begin the fight against all that is bad and puffed up, against all that is mediocre, and yet spreads itself out so broad, so intolerably broad. I beg you, keep well disposed towards me, never doubt me, and let us grow old together in common striving. I am conceited enough to believe that when we are both gone my name will be named together with yours. Let us therefore hold together in love in this life also. I never came to know Heine. I knew he was in Paris when I was there in 1846, but he was already in such a state of physical collapse that a friend of mine who knew him well, and saw him from time to time, advised me not to go and see him. However, one afternoon as I and my friend were sitting on the Boulevard, near the Rue Richelieu, sipping a cup of coffee, “Look there,” he said, “there comes Heine!” I jumped up to see, my friend stopped him, and told him who I was. It was a sad sight. He was bent down, and dragged himself slowly along, his spare greyish hair was hanging round his emaciated face, there was no light in his eyes. He lifted one of his paralysed eyelids with his hand and looked at me. For a time, like the blue sky breaking from behind grey October clouds, there passed a friendly expression across his face, as if he thought of days long gone by. Then he moved on, mumbling a line from Goethe, in a deep, broken, and yet clear voice, as if appealing for sympathy:— “Das Maulthier sucht im Düstern seinen Weg.” Thus vanished Heine, the most brilliant, sparkling, witty poet of Germany. I have seen him, that is all I can say, as Saul saw Samuel, and wished he had not seen him. However, we travel far to see the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of Nineveh and Memphis, and the ruins of a mind such as Heine’s are certainly as sad and as grand as the crumbling pillars and ruined temples shrouded under the lava of Vesuvius. “Eine schöne Welt ist da versunken,” I said to myself, and I went home and read in Heine’s “Buch der Lieder.” “Du bist wie eine Blume,” “Ich habe im Traum geweinet,” “Ein Tannenbaum steht einsam.” “Yes,” I said, “snow-white lilies spring from muddy ponds, and small mushrooms are said to grow on fresh-fallen snow.” Few poets in Germany have been or are still so admired and loved as Heine, but few poets also have been so viciously maligned as Heine. Society, no doubt, had a right to frown on him, but against such calumnies as were heaped on him by envy, hatred, and malice, it is well to remember some of his last lines:—