Heine’s youthful disappointment is of chief interest as having indirectly led to what was really the determining event of his life. When Amalie’s parents shrewdly determined on separation as the best course to be pursued with the cousins, and the university plan had been accepted by Harry, his future, which was to date from degree-taking, came on for discussion. Except in an ‘other-worldly’ sense there was, in truth, but a very limited ‘future’ possible to Jews of talent. The only open profession was that of medicine, and for that, like the son of Moses Mendelssohn, young Heine had a positive distaste. Commerce, that first and final resource of the race, which had had to satisfy Joseph Mendelssohn, like a good many others equally ill-fitted for it, was not possible to Heine, for he had sufficiently shown, not only dislike, but positive incapacity for business routine. The law suggested itself, as affording an excellent arena for those ready powers of argument and repartee which in the family circle were occasionally embarrassing, and the profession of an advocate, with the vague ‘opportunities’ it included, when pressed upon young Heine, was not unalluring to him. The immediate future was probably what most occupied his thoughts; the freedom of a university life, the flowing river in place of those bustling streets, shelves full of books exchanged for those dreary office ledgers, youthful comrades in the stead of solemnly irritated old clerks. Whether the fact that conversion was a condition of most of the delights, an inevitable preliminary of all the benefits of that visionary future; whether the grim truth that ‘a certificate of baptism was a necessary card of admission to European culture,’ was openly debated and defended, or silently and shamefacedly slurred over in these family councils, does not appear. No record remains to us but the fact that the young student successfully passed his examination in May, 1825; that he was admitted to his degree on July 20, and that between these two dates--to be precise, on the 28th of June--he was baptized as a Protestant with two clergymen for his sponsors. ‘Lest I be poor and deny thee’ was Agur’s prayer, and a wise one; for shivering Poverty, clutching at the drapery of Desire, makes unto herself many a fine, mean, flimsy garment. With no gleam of conviction to cast a flickering halo of enthusiasm over the act, and with no shadow of overwhelming circumstance to somewhat veil it, Heine made his deliberate surrender of conscience to expediency. It was full-grown apostasy, neither conscientious conversion, nor childish drifting into another faith. ‘No man’s soul is alone,’ Ruskin tells us in his uncompromising way, ‘Laocoon or Tobit, the serpent has it by the heart or the angel by the hand.’ For the rest of his life Heine was in the grip of the serpent, and that, it seems to us, was the secret of his perpetual unrest. Maimed lives are common enough; blind or deaf, or minus a leg or an arm, or