HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

confessed that he, the "born enemy of all positive religions,"
was no enthusiast for the Hebrew faith, but
he was none the less eager to proclaim himself an enthusiast
for the rights of the Jews and their civil
equality.
During his brief visit to Frankfort, he had had personal
experience of the degrading conditions to which
his people were subjected.
The contrast between his choice of residence for
twenty-five years in Paris, and the tenacity with which
Goethe clung to his home, is not as strongly marked as
the contrast between the relative positions in Frankfort
of these two men. Goethe, the grandson of the honored
chief-magistrate, surrounded in his cheerful burgherlife,
as Carlyle says, by "kind plenty, secure affection,
manifold excitement and instruction," might well
cherish golden memories of his native city. For him, the
gloomy Judengasse, which he occasionally passed,
where "squalid, painful Hebrews were banished to
scour old clothes," was but a dark spot that only
heightened the prevailing brightness of the picture.
But to this wretched by-way was relegated that other
beauty-enamored, artist-soul, Heine, when he dared set
foot in the imperial Free Town. Here must he be
locked in like a wild beast, with his miserable brethren
every Sunday afternoon. And if the restrictions were a
little less barbarous in other parts of Germany, yet how
shall we characterize a national policy which closed to
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