add any words of justification; it can only excite our sympathy for the haughty poet doomed to drain so bitter a cup. He was pressed to take the oath of naturalization, but he had too painful experience of the renunciation of his birthright ever to consent to a repetition of his error. He would not forfeit the right to have inscribed upon his tomb-stone: "Here lies a German poet." In 1844 his uncle Solomon died; and, as there was no stipulation in the banker's will that the yearly allowance hitherto granted to Heinrich should continue, the oldest heir Karl announced that this would altogether cease. This very cousin Karl had been nursed by Heine at the risk of his own life during the cholera-plague of 1832 in Paris. The grief and excitement caused by his kinsman's ingratitude fearfully accelerated the progress of the malady which had long been gaining upon the poet, and which proved to be a softening of the spinal cord. One eye was paralyzed, he lost the sense of taste, and complained that everything he ate was like clay. His physicians agreed that he had few weeks to live, and he felt that he was dying, little divining that the agony was to be prolonged for ten horrible years. It is unnecessary to dwell upon these years of darkness, in which Heine, shriveled to the proportions of a child, languished upon his "mattress-grave" in Paris. His patient resignation, his indomitable will, his sweetness and gayety of temper, and his unimpaired vigor and fertility of intellect, are too fresh in the memory of many living witnesses, and have been too frequently and recently described to make it needful here to enlarge upon them. In the crucial hour he proved no recreant to the convictions for which he had battled and bled during a lifetime. Of the report that his illness had materially modified his religious opinions, he has left a complete and emphatic denial. "I must expressly contradict the rumor that I have retreated to the threshold of any sort of church, or that I have reposed upon its bosom. No! My religious views and convictions have remained free from all churchdom; no belfry chime has allured me, no altar taper has dazzled me. I have trifled with no symbol, and have not utterly renounced my reason. I have forsworn nothing--not even my old pagan-gods, from whom it is true I have parted, but parted in love and friendship." "I am no longer a divine biped," he wrote. "I am no longer the freest German after Goethe, as Ruge named me in healthier days. I am no longer the great hero No. 2, who was compared with the grape-crowned Dionysius, whilst my colleague No. 1 enjoyed the title of a Grand Ducal Wlimarian Jupiter. I am no longer a joyous, somewhat corpulent Hellenist, laughing cheerfully down upon the melancholy Nazarenes. I am now a poor fatally-ill Jew, an emaciated picture of woe, an unhappy man."