Heine has given evidence in his letters as well as his poems that few even of his equals have ever felt the power of love so profoundly. It is well to emphasise this fact; for there are not a few who fancy that, like Petrarch, Heine embodied in his songs not the real feelings of his heart but fictitious emotions depicted to gratify poetic ambition. He did no such thing. His Love-poetry is the echo of real passion, of his first and only true Love, which cast a shadow over his whole life, and goaded him into bitter reflections more than a decade after its sad ending. He loved his cousin Molly, and writes to a friend, after an absence from home: “Rejoice with me! rejoice with me! in four weeks I shall see Molly. With her my muse will also return.” The muse did return, but in a different way from that which he had anticipated; with a smile in her face of cynicism, mockery, melancholy, which never again left her. “She loves me _not_!” he writes, in 1816. “Softly, dear Christian, pronounce that last word softly. In the first words lies the eternal living heaven, but in the last lies eternal living hell. If you could only see your friend’s countenance, how pale he looks, how bewildered, how insane, your righteous indignation at my long silence would vanish soon; better still were it if you could have one glance at my soul—then would you really learn to love me.” “I have seen her again— “‘The devil take my soul, My body be the sheriff’s, Yet I for me alone Select the loveliest woman.’ Hui! do you not shudder, Christian! Well may you shudder even as I do. Burn the letter, the Lord have mercy on my soul. I did not write these words. There on my chair sits a pale man; he wrote them. And this because it is midnight. Oh heavens! Madness cannot sin!” “There, there, do not breathe so heavily, there I have just built a lovely card-house, and on the top of it I stand and hold her in my arms!... But indeed you can hardly fancy, dear Christian, how delightful, how lovely my ruin appears. Far from her, to carry burning desires in my heart for years, is torture infernal; but to be near her and yet oft sigh in vain, whole endless weeks, for my only delight, the sight of her and—and—O! O! O! Christian! that is enough to make the purest, most pious soul flare up in wild, delirious ungodliness!” And the object of this passion, who might have saved a poet’s soul and changed him from a negative ferment into a positive agent of culture? She was the daughter of a millionaire, who, of course, in German fashion, had to marry into another rich family. To marry a poor poet would have been deemed a terrible _mésalliance_. Yet was he not a millionaire too—of ideas, as she was in beauty, her father in money? But that is reasoning _à la_ Millennium.