During the summer of 1830, while he was loitering at Helgoland, he was roused to feverish excitement by the news of the July Revolution. He inveighed against the nobility in a preface to a pamphlet, called _Kahldorf on the Nobility_, which largely increased the number of his powerful enemies. The literary censorship had long mutilated his prose writings, besides materially diminishing his legitimate income by prohibiting the sale of many of his works. He now began to fear that his personal liberty would be restricted as summarily as his literary activity; and in May, 1831, he took up his residence in Paris. He perfected himself in the French language, and by his brilliant essays on French art, German philosophy, and the Romantic School, soon acquired the reputation of one of the best prose writers of France, and the "wittiest Frenchman since Voltaire." He became deeply interested in the doctrine of St. Simonism, then at its culminating point in Paris. Its central idea of the rehabilitation of the flesh, and the sacredness of labor, found an enthusiastic champion in him who had so long denounced the impracticable spiritualism of Christianity. He, the logical clear-headed sceptic in all matters pertaining to existing systems and creeds, seems possessed with the credulity of a child in regard to every scheme of human regeneration, or shall we call it the exaltation of the Jew, for whom the Messiah has not yet arrived, but is none the less confidently and hourly expected? Embittered by repeated disappointments, by his enforced exile, by a nervous disease which had afflicted him from his youth, and was now fast gaining upon him, and by the impending shadow of actual want, Heine's tone now assumes a concentrated acridity, and his poetry acquires a reckless audacity of theme and treatment. His _Neue Lieder_, addressed to notorious Parisian women, were regarded as an insult to decency. In literary merit many of them vie with the best of his earlier songs; but the daring defiance of public opinion displayed in the choice of subject excluded all other criticism than that of indignation and rebuke. There is but a single ray to lighten the gathering gloom of Heine's life at this period. In a letter dated, April 11th, 1835, occurs his first mention of his _liaison_ with the grisette Mathilde Crescence Mirat, who afterwards became his wife. This uneducated, simple-hearted, affectionate child-wife inspired in the poet, weary of intellectual strife, a love as tender and constant as it had been sudden and passionate. A variety of circumstances having combined to reduce Heine to extreme want, he had recourse to a step which has been very severely censured. He applied for and received from the French government a pension from the fund set aside for "all those who by their zeal for the cause of the Revolution had more or less compromised themselves at home or abroad." Now that the particulars of the case are so well known, it would be superfluous to