The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1870-04-06

avoid the sight Of them. They sparkle aud /
flash with such n diabolical twinkle, and yet |
wiiLal 80 playiully, so prettily.
Lord Byron is blamed for having constantly
represented himself in Lis poetry. But be-
tween him and Trelawny--the real corsair
whom Byron poeticized.-the is this differ
ence: Byron was able to recognize and ex-
press what was poetioal in the prose of Ire
lawDys life and character, whilst Trelawny
was apparently unable to recognize, certainly
unable to express, what was poetical even in
the poetry of Byrons s; and the poet stood
somewhat low in his opinion for not being
actually the vigorous ruttian which his poetry
depicted. Who wrote the Book of Jobl Had
the man of Uz any actual existence? Pro-
badly not. Lazarus is a fiction, parabolic
symbol. But Heine is the poet Lazarus, who
wrote the poem Lazarus. And that great
epic of human suffering which he has given
us began long before the actual physical
sufferiDgs of his torturing sick-bed. His
whole lifewas passed in poeticizing suffering
his own suffering. And he did not turn it
into poetry by rhyming Obs and Abs, nor by
weeping and moaning over it, nor yet by he
roically repressing and mastering 1t, but by
intuitively and continuously contemplating
it from a poetical point of view. This is
what it behooves us to remember when we
think and speak of Heinrich Heine.
This man, be it remembered, was born
with an extraordinarily sensuous tempera-
ment, fastidious taste, and an aristocratic
impatience of vulgarity, ugliness, and COM
monplace. His natural disposition was to-
wards the romantic, the chivalresque, the dis
tinguished. And with all these instincts,
qualities, and desires, Destiny-a more ter
| rible humorist than himself-had cast his lot
in a city of traders and money y-changers-a
Philistia of the Philistines. His intellect
craved culture, his taste refinement, his tenn
permanent luxury, excitement, freedom from
control. And his birth provided him with
clerkship in a counting house His sense
| of beauty was oppressively strong; his ambi-
ton vehement; his vanity, sensitive and ex-
| cessive. His imagination hungered after
romantic adventures; and, to the last his
emotion was uncomfortable at the mere sight
| of beautiful woman. Well, and his social
| position-what was it That of Hamburg
| Judenj1,nder, a German Jew-boy.
| / can conceive of no more cruel contrast
| between q mans life and himself, none more
irresistibly provocative of the bitterest spirit
of envy and malicious antagonism to the
| general order of things, in mind teeming
with sumptuous desires, and arrogantly con-
scious of its superiority. The gift of poetry
| changed it all into humor. What remained
for Heine, but to become the mocking satir-
| list of himself, when he measured the span of
| his spirits wings with the authorized Ham
| burg inch-rule!
Schiller never experienced this anthony.
! The RdTiSChuLeT and the Deserter, the Regi
| mental Surgeon, and the Professor who used
to recite the sonorous pathos of his own verse
in the bourgeois Swabian dialect, would have
been, under any conceivable conditions OF
fate and fortune, precisely what he was--l
poet by prediction, and dTOtt de ndtSS0nc
rather than d10n de c0nquete. But if Heinz
had entered the world as a wealthy, well-borr
| Christian arstocrat, depend upon 1T he would
never have written line of verse-or, if
line Of verse, the world would not have re
cognized it as poetry. He would have passed
his life in realizing all that he imagined, bu
never possessed. 1t was his destiny, however
to become the permanent representative o
the pain which is born of contrast. One grea
and everlasting form of human sutferin
found in him its appropriate poet.
Let us not forget that his lyric crown wa
, indeed crown of thorns. His contempC
raries, I think, should deal with him NOR
| gently and more generously than he deal
t with them. For, in Heinrich Heine, wins
= we have to deal with is neither the maliG
s nifty of the Jew, nor the envious spite of th
4 Parish, nor the blasphemous execrations {
y the wretch who writhes beneath the lasf
t 1t is the sanctifying and redeeming powe
v of Poesy, who hath taken upon herself th
t sorrowfulness and the sinfulness of all thes
s saving them from the filth and mire of I'll
= material world, and uplifting the glorife
G forms of them to dwell henceforth with h'
Q in her own imperishable dominions.