The peculiarity of his mind was that it hungered with almost equal intensity for profound study and for exciting action, and that he had the gifts as well as the impulses for both. As he said of Heraclitus the Dark, whom he spent some of his best years in expounding, "there was storm in his nature." Heine, who knew and loved him well as a young man in Paris, and indeed found his society so delightful during his last years of haggard suffering, that he said, "No one has ever done so much for me, and when I receive letters from you, courage rises in me, and I feel better,"--Heine characterizes him very truly in a letter to Varnhagen von Ense. He says he was struck with astonishment at the combination of qualities Lassalle displayed--the union of so much intellectual power, deep learning, rich exposition on the one hand, with so much energy of will and capacity for action on the other. With all this admiration, however, he seems unable to regard him without misgiving, for his audacious confidence, checked by no thought of renunciation or tremor of modesty, amazed him as much as his ability. In this respect he says Lassalle is a genuine son of the modern time, to which Varnhagen and himself had acted in a way as the midwives, but on which they could only look like the hen that hatched duck's eggs and shuddered to see how her brood took to the water and swam about delighted. Heine here puts his finger on the secret of his young friend's failure. Lassalle would have been a great man if he had more of the ordinary restraining perceptions, but he had neither fear nor awe, nor even--in spite of his vein of satire--a wholesome sense of the ridiculous,--in this last respect resembling, if we believe Carlyle, all Jews. Chivalrous, susceptible, with a genuine feeling for the poor man's case, and a genuine enthusiasm for social reform, a warm friend, a vindictive enemy, full of ambition both of the nobler and the more vulgar type, beset with an importunate vanity and given to primitive lusts; generous qualities and churlish throve and strove in him side by side, and governed or misgoverned a will to which opposition was almost a native and necessary element, and which yet--or perhaps rather, therefore--brooked no check. "Ferdinand Lassalle, thinker and fighter," is the simple epitaph Professor Boeckh put on his tomb. Thinking and fighting were the craving of his nature; thinking and fighting were the warp and woof of his actual career, mingled indeed with threads of more spurious fibre. The philosophical thinker and the political agitator are parts rarely combined in one person, but to these Lassalle added yet a third, which seems to agree with neither. He was a fashionable dandy, noted for his dress, for his dinners, and, it must be added, for his addiction to pleasure--a man apparently with little of that solidarity in his own being which he sought to introduce into society at large, and yet his public career possesses an undoubted unity.