But still before the lad’s prospects could be definitely settled, one important personage remained to be consulted, the banker at Hamburg, whose wealth had gained him somewhat of the position of a family fetich. What Uncle Solomon would say to a scheme had no fictitious value about it; for even were the oracle occasionally dumb, not seldom would its speech be silver and its silence gold. A rich uncle is a very solemn possession in an impecunious family, so Harry, and Harry’s poetry, and Harry’s powers generally, had to be weighed in the Hamburg scales before any standard value could be assigned to either one of them. For three years the balance was held doubtful; the counting-house scales, accurate as they usually were, could hardly adjust themselves to the conditions of an unknown quantity, which ‘young Heine’ on an office stool must certainly have proved to his bewildered relatives. One imagines him in that correct and cramping atmosphere, fretting as he had done in the old convent school-days against its weary routine, longing with all the half-understood strength of his poet nature for the green hills and the mountain lakes, and feeling absolutely stifled with all the solemn interest shown over sordid matters. He tells us himself of some of his ‘calculations’ which would wander far afield, and leave the figures on the paper, to concern themselves with the far more perplexing units which passed the mirky office windows, as he complains, ‘at the same hour, with the same mien, making the same motions, like the puppets in a town house clock--reckoning, reckoning always on the basis, twice two are four. Frightful should it ever suddenly occur to one of these people that twice two are properly five, and that he therefore had miscalculated his whole life and squandered it all away in a ghastly error!’ Many a poem too, sorrowful or fantastic, as the mood took him, was scribbled in office hours, and very probably on office paper, thence to find a temporary home in the Hamburg _Watchman_. What could be done with such a lad? By every office standard he must inevitably have been found wanting, and one even feels a sort of sympathy with the prosaic head of the house who had made his money by the exercise of such very different talents, and whose notion of poetry corresponded very nearly with Corporal Bunting’s notion of love, that it’s by no means ‘the great thing in life boys and girls want to make it out to be--that one does not eat it, nor drink it, and as for the rest, why, it’s bother.’ It always was ‘bother’ to the banker: all through his prosperous life this poet nephew of his, who had the prophetic impertinence to tell the old man once that he owed him some gratitude for being born his uncle, and for bearing his name, was an unsatisfactory riddle. Original genius of the sort which could create a bank-book _ex nihilo_, the millionaire could have appreciated, but originality which ran into such unproductive