The Sun.
London, England, 1856-07-04 00:00:00

love strains, take the following as marvellously ex-
pressive and characteristic :
" Lay thy cheek to my cheek,
Our tears together shall flow, love ;
Press thy heart to my heart,
The flames together shall glow, love.
And when on the mighty flame shall flow
The stream that our tears shall make, love ;
And when is my arms I clasp thee fast,
My longing heart shall break, love."
Was that a recollection of Heine, in " Maud ?"
" 'The red rose cries, `• She is near, she is near ;
And the white rose weeps, She is late ;'
The larkspurs listens, I hear, I bear,'
And the lily whispers, I wait.' "
For did not Heine sing in the Intermezzo of his
" Book of Songs ?"
" The violets whisper and whisper,
And gaze at the stars above;
The roses all softly murmur
Their stories of fragant love."

In illustration of the ineffable sadness of some of
these love ditties, we give the subjoined :
" A dream has made me weep ;
I dreamed that thou wert dead !
And when I awoke, my cheeks
Were wet with the tears I'd shed.
A dream has made me weep ;
I dreamed that thou wart gone !
And when I awoke from sleep,
I bitterly still wept on.
A dream has made me weep ;
I dream'd that thou wort true !
I woke and wept, and even now
My tears break forth anew."
As an all-sufficient reason for the utterance of his
heart's grief, sings the songster :
" Children in the dark and lonely
Always feel their spirits cowed.
And to chase away their terror,
Sing their simple songs aloud.
I, as mere a child as any,
In the dark am singing hero ;
Though the tune be nowise pleasing,
Still it has dispell'd my fear."
Finally, as a most exquisite example of the pathos,
of the tenderness, of the touching and manly ge-
nius of Heinrich Heine, we transfer from his
" Book of Songs" the following delicious fragment
of poetry—poetry, as we reait, brimming tears
into our eyes, and flooding our heart with emo-
tions only evoked by a sympathy for the true and
the beautiful :
" As once on a journey I happened
The friends of my love to meet ;
Sister, and father, and mother
Came joyfully forward to greet.
They asked me how had my health been
And added, with smiling grace,
That I was in no way altered,
Though rather pale in the face.
1 ask'd after uncles and cousins,
And many a tedious spark,
And after the little puppy,
Famed for his tiny bark.
Then after my married sweetheart
I ask'd, as was only kind ;
And quite in a friendly manner,
They said she was just confined.
I wished them joy sincerely,
And lisp'd in the kindest way ;
I sent her a thousand good wishes,
Which they would, I hoped, convey.
The sister, interrupting,
Cried out, that the little hound
Had grown up wild and savage,
And in the Ithine been drowned.
The little one's like her sister,
And most when she laughs in glee;
Her eyes are the same precisely
As those that railed me."
That, we take it is poetry, true poetry. And no
wonder Heine, who could write straight from the
core of his his own heart to the core of the hearts
of other men, could—without any coxcombry at
all—boast—
" I am a German poet,
Known in all German lands;
And when they name their greatest,
My name among them stands."
Peace to his shade ! His poor, lacerated, gentle,
loving heart is still at length for ever. " Where be
his gibes now ? his flashes of merriment that were
wont to set the table in a roar ? his gambols ? his
songs 1" His Songs ?—Here ! Here, in the origi-
nal collection of them from the Reisebilder. Here,
in Mr. Wallis's graceful and truthful English
Translation. As the writer of these Songs Hein-
rich Heine will henceforth be remembered—Hein-
rich Heine, whose effigy might be most aptly pour-
trayed (as Garrick's was in Reynolds' picture,
between Comely and Tragedy) midway between
the weeping Heraclitus and the laughing Demo-
critus !

The Sub-Alpine Kingdom ; or, Experiences and
Studies in Savoy, Piedmont, and Genoa. By
Bayle St. John. London ; Chapman and Hall.
Mr. Bayle St. John is a republican de la vieile.
He is no advocate of half measures, and in his utter
detestation of monarchy, which lie looks upon as
the one " unclean thing," to be shunned at all
hazards, ho regards the future of Italy as admitting
only of one ray of light, viz., the establishment of
an Italian republic, which shall comprise the Lom-
bardo-Venetian and Neapolitan Kingdoms, the
Roman States, and the dominions of Victor Em-
manuel. That no mistake may arise as to his views
our author says in his preface—" If the two foreign
armies, French and Austrian, which are engaged in
protecting the oppressors of the country are driven
out to make way for anything but Liberalism . . .
I shall feel but little interest in the matter."
Now we are as little likely as any to find fault
with even a very advanced stage of Liberality in
politics, but when we find a writer like Mr. St.
John, under cover of a narrative of his Italian tour,
going out of his way to scatter dirt (and that pretty
thickly too) upon the only Italian Government
which has shown any regard for popular rights,
and asserting in a species of republican frenzy that
the very existence of monarchy has a tendency to
dwarf the intellect and demoralise the mind of a
nation, we admit there is an exalted sphere of Li-
beralism to which we have not yet attained.
The book before us is a clever and amusing work,
but to a great extent spoilt by a continual harping
on this string. As a proof of this we subjoin a few
extracts, taken almost at random, from its pages.
Apropos of one, Jean Gay, described by Mr. St.
John as a "Savoyard Wat Tyler," the author says,
" They (the kiHg's party) cajoled him, and got him
into their power, and royalty would have been
faithless to its character had it not immediately
broken its faith and hanged him." And again,
—tg The people who do not deserve this title (cre-
tins) are often but just removed from the same
state. In all cases the native mind seems clogged.
It turns slowly. I wonder how the country can
have produced so astute a race of sovereigns." The
next is still more absurd :—" As was natural to ex-
pect, the inhabitants of the districts where intel-
lect is but slightly developed are fervently devoted
to monarchy." It is seriously put forth, too, as
" the fundamental doctrine of European monarchy
—that when a man by any means acquires the
power of taxing or hanging at pleasure any consi-
derable number of human beings, he at once be-
comes God's representative, and his fortunes are
indissolubly bound up with those of Christianity."
" Ferocious cruelties" are stated to be the " usual
tests of royal existence," and the execution of
Louis the Sixteenth, is stated to be "identical
with putting out of the way a noxious animal dif-
ferently organised from ourselves."
These extracts are taken without any particular
care in their selection, and go far to prove that
although Mr. St. John can, and often does write,
both amusing and instructive matter, the politics
incorporated therewith are of an extravagant, not
to say rabid, description.
Nor do the aristocracy fare one whit better than
the kings themselves. "There are few rich men
without the taint of nobility ; few people, there-
fore, of liberal opinions." Some of Mr. St. John's
sneers are amusing. Of La Piccolomini, whose
birth he almost forgives, he says—" She succeeded
prodigiously at Turin. The elegant young gentle-
men from under the porticos thought it necessary
to be almost epileptic on the occasion. I never
saw anything more offensive, and was glad to be
told that many of the youths in the pit whom I
took for hairdressers and, waiters were idle slips of
aristocracy. It is no matter what they say or do."
One more extract on this subject, and we have
done. It involves, however, a more serious charge
against the author, who appears not merely to
palliate, but to revel in the atrocious excesses of
the first French Revolution, and to find in that of
1848 but one fault, an unwillingness to shed the
necessary amount of royal and aristocratic blood.
We can scarcely believe that it is in these terms
he speaks of the brutal massacre of women and
children, the " Noyades" and " Fusillades" of
Lyons and Marseilles. " Except when they
cleared away the aristocratic vermin last century
in France, the people in revolution have always
gone off into foolish ecstacies of forgetfulness and
forgiveness—there is nothing so imprudent as to
spare an enemy who keeps a dagger in his sleeve.
It is not now perhaps necessary to kill, but it .
s
certainly necessary to impoverish and banish whole
classes and orders both in Italy and elsewhere as
soon as accident gives victory to the people."
We have then given an idea of the moral de-
duced by Mr. St. John from all he saw at Pied-
mont and the adjacent territory. We respect his
ardour in the cause of Italian liberty, but we wholly
differ from his conclusion. Charles Albert it is ad-
mitted was very far from faultless. Per-
sonal ambiti on shared largely in the causes
which induced him to risk his life and crown
against the forces of Austria. His son, the pre-
sent King, may not be inclined to make the full
amount of confession which the popular voice of
Piedmont requires. He may be, and probably is,
yet fettered by those despotic trainers which have