HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

such a man as Heine every career that could give free
play to his genius, and offered him the choice between
money changing and medicine?
It was not till he had exhausted every means of endeavoring
to secure a remission of the humiliating decree
that he consented to the public act of apostasy, and
was baptized in the summer of 1823 in the Lutheran
parsonage of Heiligenstadt with the name of Johann
Christian Heinrich. During the period of his earnest
labors for Judaism, he had buried himself with fervid
zeal in the lore of his race, and had conceived the idea
of a prose-legend, the Rabbi of Bacharach, illustrating
the persecutions of his people during the middle ages.
Accounts vary as to the fate of this work; some affirm
that the manuscript was destroyed in a fire at Hamburg,
and others that the three chapters which the
world possesses are all that were ever completed. Heine,
one of the most subjective of poets, treats this theme in
a purely objective manner. He does not allow himself a
word of comment, much less of condemnation concerning
the outrages he depcts. He paints the scene as an
artist, not as the passionate fellow-sufferer and avenger
that he is. But what subtle eloquence lurks in that restrained
cry of horror and indignation which never
breaks forth, and yet which we feel through every line,
gathering itself up like thunder on the horizon for a
terrific outbreak at the end!
Would that we could hear the explosion burst at