channels as poetry-book making was quite beyond him, and that he never read the young man’s verses it is needless to say. Even in his own immediate family and for his first book poor Harry found no audience, save his mother; and to the very end of his days Solomon Heine for the life of him could see nothing in his nephew but a _dumme Junge_, who never ‘got on,’ and who made a jest of most things, even of his wealthy and respectable relatives. It was scarcely the old man’s fault; one can only see to the limits of one’s vision, and a poet’s soul was not well within Solomon Heine’s range. According to his lights he was not ungenerous. That Harry had not the making of a clerk in him, those three probationary years had proved to demonstration, and in the determination at which the banker presently arrived, of giving those indefinite talents which he only understood enough to doubt, a chance of development by paying for a three years’ university course at Bonn, he seems to have come fully up to any reasonable ideal of a rich uncle. It is just possible that a secondary motive influenced his generosity, for Harry, besides scribbling, had found a relief from office work by falling in love with one of the banker’s daughters, who would seem not to have shared the family distaste for poetry. The little idyl was of course out of the question in so realistic a circle, and the young lady, to do her justice, seems herself to have been speedily reconverted to the proper principles in which she had been trained. No unfit pendant to the ‘Amy, shallow-hearted’ with whom a more recent generation is more familiar, this Cousin Amy of poor Heine’s married and ‘kept her carriage’ with all due despatch, whilst he, at college, was essaying to mend his ‘heart broken in two’ with all the styptics which are as old and, alas, as hurtful as such fractures. Poetical exaggeration notwithstanding--and besides her own especial love-elegy, Amalie Heine, under thin disguises, is the heroine of very many of the love-poems--there is little room for doubt, that if not so seriously injured as he thought, Heine’s heart did nevertheless receive a wound, which ached for many and many a long day, from this girl’s weak or wilful inconstancy. Heartache is, however, nearly as much a matter-of-course episode in most young people’s lives as measles, and the consequences of either malady are only very exceptionally serious.