HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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went on composing with undiminished
fire to the last, he was truly brave.
Nothing could clog that aerial lightness.
" Pouvez-vous siffler ? " his doctor asked
him one day, when he was almost at his
last gasp; — "siffler," as every one
knows, has the double meaning of to
whistle and to hiss: —"H^las ! non," was
his whispered answer; " pas m6me une
com^die de M. Scribe ! " M, Scribe is,
or was, the favourite dramatist of the
French Philistine. " My nerves," he
said to some one who asked him about
them in 1855, the year of the great Exhibition
in Paris, " my nerves are of
that (juite singularly remarkable miserableness
of nature, that I am convinced
they would get at the Exhibition the
grand medal for pain and misery." He
read all the medical books which treated
of his complaint. "But," said he to
some one who found him thus engaged,
" what good this reading is to do me I
don't know, except that it will qualify
me to give lectures in heaven on the
ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases
of the spinal marrow." What a
matter of grim seriousness are our own
ailments to most of us ! yet with this
gaiety Heine treated his to the end.
That end, so long in coming, came at
last. Heine died on the 17th of February
1856, at the age of fifty-eight. By
his will he forbade that his remains
should be transported to Germany. He
lies buried in the cemetery of Montmartre,
at Paris.