Heinrich Heine was born in 1799, the same year as Balzac. He was a Jew, and it was a time when the Jews in Frankfort were penned up in a filthy ghetto and subjected to insults and outrages; the “Jew-grief” was one of the deep elements of this great poet’s soul. Another element was the shame of the “poor relation”; he had a rich uncle, a millionaire banker in the bourgeois city of Hamburg, who took the youthful genius into his office at the age of nineteen, and soon afterwards kicked him out, telling him that he was “a fool.” Among other follies, the young genius had fallen in love with the rich banker’s daughter, and she toyed with him for a while, and then married respectably, and gave the poet’s heart a wound from which it never recovered. To get rid of him the uncle set him to studying law; but he made a poor student and a worse lawyer. In order to be allowed to practice he had to be baptized as a Christian; this doesn’t really do one any harm, but it caused shame to Heine throughout his life. He had no real religion, being a child of Voltaire, a rebel, and in due course a revolutionist. He was a poet, a maker of exquisite verses, full of unutterable tenderness. Also he was a lover; he wandered here and there with his broken heart, trying many casual loves, and paying for his adventures a frightful penalty, as will appear. We are back in the days of the “Holy Alliance,” and all the little princelings of Germany are holding the thoughts of their subjects in a vise. Heine put satirical and skeptical ideas into rhyme; he had a bitter wit, and his words flew all over Germany, and the Hohenzollerns of Prussia not merely suppressed one book, they paid him the compliment of prohibiting everything he might write. “Put a sword on my coffin,” he said, in one of his stanzas, “for I have been a soldier in the war for the liberation of humanity.” The revolution of 1830 came in France, and Heine was deeply stirred, and hoped for something to happen in Germany. But he had to wait a long time, nearly a hundred years; then, strange whim of history, three million American boys had to cross the ocean to win the political battle of this German-Jewish rebel! Heine could stand Germany no longer, and went to live in Paris, where he was welcomed by the whole romantic school. He wrote letters, articles and verses, which went back to Germany and helped carry on the war for freedom. His genius and wit were such that all the efforts to bar his books only promoted their circulation. Fate played a queer prank upon the Prussian Junkerdom--their most popular sentimental songs, which they know by heart and sing on all possible occasions, were written by a rebel exile whom they had chased about the streets in a Judenhetze; the same man who wrote the terrible stanzas of “The Silesian Weavers,” picturing the starving wretches sitting in their huts and weaving a three-fold curse, against God, King and Fatherland--“Old Germany, we weave thy shroud--we weave, we weave!”