Submission is the right word for this conversion. It was an act of expediency such as other ambitious men found unavoidable in those days; but Heine performed it in a spirit of bitterness caused not so much by a sense of apostasy as by contempt for the conventional Christianity that he now embraced. There can be no sharper contrast than that presented by such a poem as _The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar_ and sundry satirical pieces not included in this volume. Two vacations at Norderney, where Heine renewed and deepened acquaintance with his beloved North Sea, not very resolute attempts to take up the practice of law in Hamburg, a trip to London, vain hopes of a professorship in Munich, a sojourn in Italy, vacillations between Hamburg, Berlin, and the North Sea, complete the narrative of Heine's movements to the end of the first period of his life. He was now Heine the writer: poet, journalist, and novelist. _The Journey to the Hartz_, first published in a magazine, _Der Gesellschafter_, in January and February, 1826, was issued in May of that year by Campe in Hamburg, as the first volume of _Pictures of Travel_, beginning with the poems of _The Return Home_ and concluding with the first group of hymns to the North Sea, written at Norderney in the previous year. _Pictures of Travel II_, issued in 1827, consisted of the second cycle of poems on the _North Sea_, an account in prose of life on the island, entitled _Norderney, The Book Le Grand_, to which epigrams by Immermann were appended, and extracts from _Letters from Berlin_ published in 1822. _Pictures of Travel III_ (1830) began with experiences in Italy, but degenerated into a provoked but ruthless attack upon Platen. _Pictures of Travel IV_ (1831) included _English Fragments_, the record of Heine's observations in London, and _The City of Lucca_, a supplementary chapter on Italy. In October, 1827, Heine collected under the title _Book of Songs_ nearly all of his poems written up to that time. The first period in Heine's life closes with the year 1831. The Parisian revolution of July, 1830, had turned the eyes of all Europe toward the land in which political experiments are made for the benefit of mankind. Many a German was attracted thither, and not without reason Heine hoped to find there a more promising field for the employment of his talents than with all his wanderings he had discovered in Germany. Toward the end of May, 1831, he arrived in Paris, and Paris was thenceforth his home until his death on the seventeenth of February, 1856. II