Heine's personal history is unusually obscure. An interesting and valuable _Life_ of him has been written by Herr Adolph Stroeltmann, but the author's materials are avowedly scanty, and the Heine memoirs, which have long been watched for with hungry eyes by the critics and biographers, are still withheld from publication by members of the family, with the prospect that they will never be given to the public. He was born at Düsseldorf on the Rhine December 13, 1799. "On my cradle," he writes, "fell the last moonbeams of the eighteenth century and the first morning-glow of the nineteenth"--words not a little significant of the lifelong sense within him of the genius of a bygone age and the spirit of a coming one. His boyhood was passed during the time of Napoleon's supremacy in the Rhine provinces, and among other changes wrought under French jurisdiction was the establishment by imperial decree of certain state schools called "lyceums," at one of which Heine received the greater part of his school-education. The town was garrisoned by French troops, and here it was that the boy became acquainted with the old French drummer whom he afterward commemorates so charmingly in the sketch of his childhood known as the "Buch Le Grand." These early influences must certainly have been at the root of that passion for French ideas and French manners which characterized his later years, just as his boyish visions of the Great Emperor as he passed through Düsseldorf never quite lost their enchantment in after life, and long blinded him to the real meaning of Bonapartism. Twice he saw Napoleon--once in 1811, and again in the following year--and his impressions are worth recording, especially as they are given in his most characteristic manner: "What were my feelings when I saw him with my own favored eyes!--himself, hosannah! the emperor! It was in the avenue of the court-garden at Düsseldorf. As I pushed my way among the gaping people I thought of his battles and his deeds; and yet I thought at the same time of the police regulations against riding through the avenue on pain of a five-thaler fine, and the emperor rode quietly through the avenue and no policeman stopped him. Never will his image vanish from my memory. I shall always see him high upon his steed, with those eternal eyes in his marble imperial face looking down with the calmness of Fate on the guards defiling by. He was sending them to Russia, and the old grenadiers looked up to him in such awful devotion, such deeply-conscious sympathy, such pride of death!-- Te, Cæsar, morituri salutant!