HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Martyr of Montmartre
yet Henri Heine is a kind, good-hearted man to
the afflicted, the sorrowing, or the unfortunate.
He has always a word of interest, a look of sympathy,
a double-handed shake of the hand, for
those who seem to need his love, or to ask for his
bounty. But he has more than this. His purse is
never his own where humanity has a claim upon it,
and charity asks not in vain for his aid. But take
care! do not be pathetic, do not round your phrase,
or poetize your appeal, when you ask him to assist
some unhappy exile or some unfortunate being.
For if you do, the ludicrousness of your having
'got up' the scene, 'simply to induce him to perform
an act of humanity,' will rush across his
mind; and he will laugh, not at you, and not at the
misery of which you speak, but at the scene you
are enacting. This is Henri Heine. On he writes,
and on he labors, a real literary Hercules, and one
third of Europe thinks him unrivalled."
The one third of Europe, mentioned in these
reminiscences of 1842, included old and young,
lords and commoners, Germans, Frenchmen, and
not a few Englishmen. It was in this very year of
1842 that George Meredith attended school in
Germany but none of the school authors were as
dear to him as the proscribed Heine. After his six-
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