How came Heinrich Heine to be a product of German soil at all? is the first question which naturally arises in regard to him--that "son of the Revolution," as he somewhere styles himself, who made France his adopted country for nearly half his life; with his ardent sympathy for French ideas; with his wonderful wit, which laid presumptuous claim to the mantle of Voltaire and Aristophanes; with such rapid and facile powers of expression for his thought as makes even Lowell, who greatly amuses himself at the expense of German composition in general, admit that "Heine can be airily light in German;" with his intense belief in the progressive spirit of his own time, and his intense hatred of its accompanying advance of utilitarianism and philistinism? Even the poet's laurel, the closest tie that bound him to his own people, he would have been willing to lay aside. "I do not know," he writes, "if I fairly deserve to have my grave adorned with the poet's laurel. Poetry, however much I loved her, was always but a sacred plaything to me, or a consecrated means to divine ends. I have never laid much stress on the poet's fame, and care little if my songs get praise or blame. But ye may lay a sword upon my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the War of Liberation for humanity." And yet, in spite of it all, by his culture, by his sentiment and by his real sympathies, Heine belonged to the land of his birth rather than to the land of his adoption. But there is one circumstance which must be regarded at the very outset in treating of him--a circumstance of race, which colors more deeply than any other his intellectual as well as his worldly career, and leaves its mark on almost everything that comes from his hand: Heine was a Jew, possessing certain indelible characteristics of his race. This we must never forget, for Heine himself never forgot it. His Jewish origin was always a mingled source of bitterness and pride. His deification of the chosen people and the pitiless mockery which he bestows on them would be hard to reconcile in another. He gloried in what their past could show, but spared no words of ridicule and scorn for the days of their weakness and infirmity: he became unfaithful to their traditions, and was baptized a Christian in order to obtain a university degree; and yet he never escaped what he himself calls "the ineradicable Jew in him."