Heine's own distinction between the Hellenic and the Judaic views of life. Heine, vitally absorbed in all the questions that the present brought, and in the very heat and stress of its conflicts, watched the "Great Pagan" in the fulness of his years crystallizing his life's experience in beautiful and polished, but ever more and more lifeless, forms of verse, striving toward pure Hellenism, as Goethe's followers called his imitation of classic forms, withdrawn from all the social and political problems of the day far into the realms of scientific research; and he cried out impatiently about coldness, indifference to the true interests of mankind--compared Goethe's creations to the Greek statues in the Louvre, with no humanity in them, but only divinity and stone. But Goethe, with his theory of color, with his botany, anatomy, osteology and the rest, had caught a spark from what was to be the genius of a future generation, and this Heine was not prophet enough to see. The time, we have said, was favorable for Heine's entrance into literature: it was anything but favorable for the rôle which he began almost at once to play--that of political and social agitator. The political atmosphere of Germany during the years that preceded the July Revolution was stifling in the extreme. The famous War of Liberation had freed the people from the grasp of Napoleon, but seemed only to have increased the weight of home despotism: the press was subjected to searching government investigation, and as a result all political opinions were suppressed in the daily journals, which in lieu of politics supplied little else but theatrical and musical gossip. This was no condition of things for Heine, who could never move in prescribed paths in any direction, and who had to submit to seeing his work scarred and mutilated by the red pencil of the censorship; and he began to look toward France as a land of refuge in case of accident, as it were, until finally, after the July Revolution, the Rhine became a Jordan and Paris a New Jerusalem to his longing eyes, and he emigrated thither, to the land of freedom and "good cheer," to return but once again to his native country. There is no real evidence of his exile being a compulsory one, but under such circumstances his life at home must have been at best a precarious one. According to his own delightfully humorous account, he had learned from an old councillor at Berlin who had passed many years at the fortress of Spandau how unpleasant it was to wear chains in winter. "'If they had only warmed our chains for us a little they would not have made such an unpleasant impression: they ought, too, to have had the forethought to have them perfumed with essence of roses and laurel, as they do in this country.' I asked my councillor if he often had oysters at Spandau. He said, 'No: Spandau was too far from the sea. Meat,' he said, 'was quite rare there too, and there was no other kind of fowl than the flies which fell into