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Updated: May 18, 2025
A thing after the manner of Heine's 'Florentine Nights. Any book about Greek gods would be welcome, anything about temples of ivory-coloured stone and purple seas, red caps, chests of jewels, and lizards in the sun. I wish there was another 'Thais. The men here are getting a kind of newspaper sheet of literature scraps called The Times Broadsheets. Snippets, but mostly from good stuff.
He greeted me at once as a child of the house, and we two homeless creatures found in our memories of this long-lost home the first common basis to our friendship. We generally spent our evenings with old Fischer at Heine's, where, amid hopeful conversation, we regaled ourselves on potatoes and herrings, of which the meal chiefly consisted.
The legend, dealing originally with incidents in the lives of the saints and with places made sacred by association with holy men, has, as a rule, some slight historical basis; is cast in narrative form and told as a record of fact; and, in cases where it is entirely imaginative, deals with some popular type of character like Robin Hood or Rip Van Winkle; or with some mysterious or tragic event, as Tennyson's "Idylls of the King" are poetic renderings of part of a great mass of legends which grew up about a little group of imaginary or semi-historical characters; Longfellow's "Golden Legend" is a modern rendering of a very old mediaeval tale; Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is an example of purely imaginative prose, and Heine's "Lorelei" of a purely imaginative poetic legend.
Below the houses are shops, and the first story of Heine's house is a butcher shop, with sides of pork and mutton hanging in the windows; above, where the Heine family must once have lived, a gold-beater and a frame-maker displayed their signs. But did the Heine family really once live there?
I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature: his revengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness; and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read. The tenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but, as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?
Charles Godfrey Leland, in adapting to our language the songs of Heine, is now well supplemented with some versions from among his prose works by another Philadelphian translator, Mr. Simon Adler Stern. Heine's prose, delicate in its pellucid brightness as any of his poetry, cannot be held too precious by the interpreter.
Byron and Shelley will long be remembered, long after the inadequacy of their actual work is clearly recognized, for their passionate, their Titanic effort to flow in the main stream of modern literature; their names will be greater than their writings; stat magni nominis umbra. Heine's literary good fortune was superior to that of Byron and Shelley.
In saying this, we mustn't forget that "Camille Selden" said it was ridiculous to sentimentalize about Mme. Heine. Yet, at the same time, we must remember Heine's point of view. When "Camille Selden" first sought his acquaintance, he had been living with Mathilde for some twenty years.
He practised as a solicitor in Edin. 1840-45, after which he went to London and became head of the firm of Martin and Leslie, parliamentary agents. His translations include Dante's Vila Nuova, Oehlenschläger's Correggio and Aladdin, Heine's Poems and Ballads, Schiller's Song of the Bell, and Hertz's King René's Daughter.
His friend Campe had been previously advised of "my marriage with the lovely and honest creature who has lived by my side for years as Mathilde Heine; was always respected and looked upon as my wife, and was defiled by foul names only by some scandal-loving Germans of the Frankfort clique." Heine's duel resulted in nothing more serious than a flesh-wound on the hip.
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