Such a death is terribly sad, but its heroism has all the pathos and nobility of real tragedy, and atones in more than full measure for a life that was not always heroic. Can it atone as well for a literary name that was not wholly untarnished? Nothing can quite justify certain literary sins which Heine at times committed, but when such offences are noted down it is best to let them go. Heine's life was certainly one of unremitting warfare--one long record of personal attacks on his enemies, of broils with his critics, of unblushing license of speech, of undaunted adherence to the ideas for which he lived and wrote--one long cry of protest against the outward conditions of life and society as he found them, which rings in those strange minor tones of feeling that are the keynote of his genius, rising sometimes to an almost childish petulance, and sinking again into chords of the truest pathos. Where is his place and what was his achievement it is very hard to say. He was one of those figures which arise here and there in the history of literature--of men intensely penetrated with the spirit of the age in which they live, who are alike bitterly impatient of its follies and its conservatism. They cannot see far into the future, they cannot always estimate the past: their genius is not universal, but it has always something of the vitality of present interest about it, and is subject in no common degree to the errors of contemporary judgment. Byron was another such figure, and, though his genius had almost nothing in common with Heine's, the ideas for which they fought were very nearly the same--ideas which were the outgrowth of the Revolution, by which they sought to stem the tide of reactionary feeling that set in so strongly from every direction, in religion and politics as well as in literature, during the early part of our own century. Their method of fighting, too, was the same, for they both used their own persons as weapons in their cause; but where Byron's egotism becomes dreary and oppressive, Heine's awakens that vivid feeling of interest which comes usually with personal intercourse alone. He uses himself, along with and as a part of his material, in such a way that his very egotism lends to his writings the greater part of their force and originality, and becomes one of the most potent instruments of his irony and wit. Heine chose for himself the sword of the soldier rather than the poet's laurel, but he chose to fight alone, and the nineteenth century is not the age nor its society the field for single-handed combat. That he seems to have felt this himself, one of his latest poems from the _Romancero_ will show. I give it in Lord Houghton's admirable translation: it is called ENFANT PERDU. In Freedom's war of "Thirty Years" and more A lonely outpost have I held in vain, With no triumphant hope or prize in store, Without a thought to see my home again.