And surely the reinstatement of the flesh, the restoration of the body to honor and to perfection, is, as I have said elsewhere, an admirable purpose. It is only through the wise reinstatement of the flesh, if I am not mistaken, that the condition of men is likely to be much bettered; for it grows clearer every year that educating will not accomplish this, or medicine, or penalties, or perhaps even preaching. But Heine was no theorist in these matters: he was poet before all, and he was too absolutely, too completely a poet for the justest thought, or for his own good. Heine's nature lacked that tonic bent toward accurate knowledge, toward dispassionate observation and thought, which was the salvation, for instance, of Goethe, and which has been the salvation of all great natures who have sought to excel in character as well as in art. The spring of clear, untroubled intelligence did not flow for Heine, the stream which should flow upon the homestead of every poet, the _fons Baudusiæ splendidior vitro_. In those invigorating waters he seldom refreshed his spirit as the greatest poets have done--in meditation, in discipline, in dispassionate inquiry. These are the spiritual antiseptics that are needful at least for the more carnal poetic temperaments. Am I using fanciful metaphors? I mean that the poet who may undertake to put forth a new gospel of conduct, must first think long and strictly. But Heine did not think strictly, and his critical theory of life need not detain us. Heine thought of pleasure, for instance, as Mr. Ruskin thinks of work, that it is a thing to be had for the asking; the fact being in any state of society yet established inexorably the reverse--namely, that neither work nor pleasure is commonly to be had on demand.