_On eût dit un Apollon germanique_--so Gautier said of the Heine of 1835; twenty years later an English visitor wrote of him--"He lay on a pile of mattresses, his body wasted so that it seemed no bigger than a child under the sheet which covered him--his eyes closed, and the face altogether like the most painful and wasted 'Ecce Homo' ever painted by some old German painter." His sufferings were only relieved by ever larger doses of morphia; but although still more troubles came to him, and the failure of a bank robbed him of his small savings, his spirit remained unconquered. "He is a wonderful man," said one of his doctors; "he has only two anxieties--to conceal his condition from his mother, and to assure his wife's future." His literary work, though it decreased in amount, never declined in power; only, in the words of his friend Berlioz, it seemed as though the poet was standing at the window of his tomb, looking around on the world in which he had no longer a part. He saw a few friends, of whom Ferdinand Lassalle, with his exuberant power and enthusiasm, was the most interesting to him, as the representative of a new age and a new social faith; and the most loved, that girl-friend who sat for hours or days at a time by the "mattress-grave" in the Rue d' Amsterdam, reading to him or writing his letters or correcting proofs. To the last the loud, bright voice of Mathilde, when he chanced to hear it, scolding the servants or in other active exercise, often made him stop speaking, while a smile of delight passed over his face. He died on the 16th of February 1856. He was buried, silently, in Montmartre, according to his wish; for, as he said, it is quiet there. III. Throughout and above all Heine was a poet. From first to last he was led by three angels who danced for ever in his brain, and guided him, singly or together, always. They were the same as in _Atta Troll_ he saw in the moonlight from the casement of Uraka's hut--the Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the blond and gay fairy of France; Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm of the oasis, and with all the fragrance of the East between her breasts: "O, you dead Jewess, I love you most, more than the Greek goddess, more than that fairy of the North."[3]