Hab’ eine Jungfrau nie verführet Mit Liebeswort, mit Schmeichelei, Ich hab’ auch nie ein Weib berühret, Wüsst’ ich, dass sie vermählet sei. Wahrhaftig, wenn es anders wäre, Mein Name, er verdiente nicht Zu strahlen in dem Buch der Ehre, Man dürft’ mir spucken in’s Gesicht. That is strong language and evidently meant as an answer to his spies and enemies. But why will people always spy into the most uninteresting part of a poet’s life? Why are they bent on knowing on what terms Dante stood to Beatrice, Petrarch to Laura, Goethe to Frau von Stein, Heine to George Sand. Volumes have been written on their intimate relations, and yet whom does it concern, and what can it teach us? Let the dead bury their dead. Whilst at Leipzig as a young student I still imagined myself a poet, and from time to time some of my poems appeared, to my great joy, in the local papers. I even belonged to a poetical society, and I remember at least two of us who in later times became very popular writers in Germany. One was a Jew of the name of Wolfsohn, whose play, “Only a Soul,” giving the tragedy of a Russian peasant girl, proved a great success all over Germany, and is still acted from time to time. He died young. Another, Theodor Fontane, is alive, and one of the best known and best loved novel-writers of the day. He was a charming character, a man of great gifts, full of high spirits and inexhaustible good humour. He began life in a chemist’s shop, and had a very hard struggle in his youth, which may have prevented his growing to his full height and strength. He might have been another Heine, but the many years of hard work and hopeless drudgery kept him from soaring as high as his young wings would have carried him. I remember but little of his poetry now, there remains but the sense of pleasure which I derived from it at the time. Now and then, as it happens to all of us, a few long-forgotten lines rise to the surface. In a political poem of his, I remember a young Liberal being warned with the following words:— Sonst spazierst du nach Siberien In die langen Winterferien, Die zugleich Hundstage sind! And I have never forgotten the last lines of his beautiful poem, “Die schöne Rosamunde,” where he says of the King:— Ihn traf des Lebens grösster Schmerz: Der Schmerz um dieses Leben!