Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) The Camelot Series. EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS. HEINE'S PROSE WRITINGS. THE PROSE WRITINGS OF HEINRICH HEINE: EDITED, WITH AN INTRODUCTION, BY HAVELOCK ELLIS. WALTER SCOTT LONDON: 24 WARWICK LANE PATERNOSTER ROW 1887 CONTENTS. PAGE REISEBILDER 1 LONDON 47 WELLINGTON 52 THE LIBERATION 57 JAN STEEN 65 THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL 68 RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY 142 FLORENTINE NIGHTS 179 DON QUIXOTE 243 GODS IN EXILE 268 CONFESSIONS 290 HEINE. I. Heine gathers up and focuses for us in one vivid point all those influences of his own time which are the forces of to-day. He appears before us, to put it in his own way, as a youthful and militant Knight of the Holy Ghost, tilting against the spectres of the past and liberating the imprisoned energies of the human spirit. His interest from this point of view lies, largely, apart from his interest as a supreme lyric poet, the brother of Catullus and Villon and Burns; we here approach him on his prosaic--his relatively prosaic--side. One hemisphere of Heine's brain was Greek, the other Hebrew. He was born when the genius of Goethe was at its height; his mother had absorbed the frank earthliness, the sane and massive Paganism, of the Roman elegies, and Heine's ideals in all things, whether he would or not, were always Hellenic--using that word in the large sense in which Heine himself used it--even while he was the first in rank and the last in time of the Romantic poets of Germany. He sought, even consciously, to mould the modern emotional spirit into classic forms. He wrought his art simply and lucidly, the aspirations that pervade it are everywhere sensuous, and yet it recalls oftener the turbulent temper of Catullus than any serener ancient spirit.