One lingers over these early influences, the right understanding of which goes far to supply the key to some of the later puzzles. Oddly enough, the clouds which by and by hid the blue are discernible from the very first, and these early years give the silver lining to those gathering clouds. In view of the dark days coming one at least rejoices that Heine’s childhood was a happy one; at home the merry mischievous boy was quite a hero to his two younger brothers, and a hero and a companion both to his only sister, the Löttchen who was the occasion of his earliest recorded composition. It is a favourite recollection of this lady, who is living still,[11] how she, a blushing little maid of ten, won a good deal of unmerited praise for a school theme, till a trembling confession was extorted from her that the real author was her brother Harry. His mother, too, was exceedingly proud of her handsome eldest son, whose resemblance in many ways to her was the sweetest flattery. And besides the adoring home circle Harry found a great ally for playhours in an old French ex-drummer, who had marched to victory with Napoleon’s legions, and who had plenty of tales to tell the boy of the wonderful invincible Kaiser, whom one day--blest never-to-be-forgotten vision--the boy actually saw ride through Düsseldorf on his famous white steed (1810). Heine never quite lost the glamour cast over him in his youth; France, Germany, Judea, each in a sense his _patria_, was each, in the time to come, ‘loved both ways,’ each in turn mocked at bitterly enough when the mood was on him, but always with France, the ‘poet of the nations’ as our own English poetess calls her, the sympathies of this cosmopolitan poet were keenest--a perhaps not unnatural state of feeling when we reflect how fact and fiction both combined to produce it. The French occupation of the principality had been a veritable deliverance to its inhabitants, Christian and Jewish alike, and what boy, in his own person, led out of bondage, would not have thrilled to such stories as the old drummer had to tell of the real living hero of it all? And the boy in question, we must bear in mind, was a poet _in posse_.