HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

last! We long for it throughout as the climax and the
necessary result of the lowering electric influences of the
story, and we lay aside the never-to-be-completed fragment
with the oppression of a nightmare. But a note of
such tremendous power as Heine had struck in this
romance required for its prolonged sustention a singleness
of purpose and an exaltation of belief in its efficacy
and truth, which he no longer possessed after his renunciation
of Judaism. He was no longer at one with
himself, for no sooner was the irrevocable step taken
than it was bitterly repented, not as a recantation of his
principles—for as such, no one who follows the development
of his mind can regard it—but as an unworthy
concession to tyrannic injustice. How sensitive
he remained in respect to the whole question is proved
most conspicuously by his refraining on all occasions
from signing his Christian name, Heinrich. Even his
works he caused to appear under the name of H.
Heine, and was once extremely angry with his publisher
for allowing by mistake the full name to be
printed.
The collection of poems in prose and verse known as
the Reisehilder, embraced several years of Heine's literary
activity». and represent widely-varying phases of
his intellectual development. We need only turn to the
volumes themselves to guess how bitter an experience
must have filled the gap between the buoyant stream of
sunny inspiration that ripples through the Harz-Reise,
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