HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

turb Heine's slumber. He whom all asperities fatigue,
whom all discords trouble, let such a one neither move
nor think—let him go to bed and shut his eyes."
Only in his last poems, which were not to be published
till after his death, has Heine given free vent to
the bitterness of his anguish. During the long sleepless
night when he lay writhing with pain or exhausted by
previous paroxysms, his mind, preternaturally clear and
vigorous, conceived the glowing fantasies of the Romancero,
or the Job-like lamentations of the Lazarus
poems. This mental exercise was his protection against
insanity: and the thought of his cherished wife, he
affirmed, was his only safeguard against the delirious
desire to seize the morphine bottle by his side, and with
one draught put an end to his agony. On the night of
the 16th of February, 1856, came the long-craved release—and
on the 20th of February without mass or
"Kaddish," according to his express wish, he was buried
in the cemetery of Montmartre.
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