This dark closing period of Heine's life has a fascination about it; it holds the attention like the background of a Rembrandt etching, with its dimly-seen forms that appear to stir in the gloom, ghostly, half-alive; such a contrast there is between his gloomy close and the bright projection of his earlier career. Shall we call his life a failure as regards himself, his personal success and happiness? Upon that point we may not pronounce too confidently. He would have chosen it had the choice been offered him with full knowledge of the alternatives; he would have preferred it to any commonplace existence. There will always be those who hold that such careers as Byron's or Heine's, such fitful careers, with their fierce tempests, their ecstatic sunshine, their "awful brevity," are preferable to any serener life, however long; and least of all may we pity Heine. With what scorn would he look down upon our pity! Heine's life has a peculiar value for the student of modern life, in that it has what we may call an exemplary interest. For Heine made that costly sacrificial experiment of which the old examples never suffice us; the experiment which each new generation requires anew, in which nature in her wasteful way insists on consuming the finest geniuses. As Byron had attempted just before him, so Heine attempted to think and to live without reserves, to compass the round of sentiment and sensation, to touch the entire range of experience. Like Byron, he could not pass through the fire; he fell, the flame licked him up. And yet, far more truly than many a martyr, Byron and Heine gave their lives for us. Not, indeed, in the professed spirit of the martyr, not purposing the sacrifice, but for that very reason making it the more significant. They experimented lavishly, daringly with life, and in their poems they give us real life as no other poets since have done. They are real passion, real thought, the ruddy drops of the sad heart. Heine's "Book of Songs" is his own body and blood. One feels of it what Whitman says of his "Leaves of Grass": "This is no book; who touches this touches a man."