HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Continuator of Goethe
and make us feel the agitated beating of their hearts.
He indicates a whole sad history in a single quatrain;
there is not an image in it, not a thought; but it is
beautiful, simple, and perfect as a big round tear; it
is pure feeling breathed in pure music."
If in lyric poetry George Eliot ranked Heine as
second only to Goethe, she felt that as an artist in
prose he surpassed even this genius of Weimar.
Heine proved, according to her, what no writer
before him had been able to prove, namely, that it
was possible to be witty in German. In his hands,
prose ceased to be heavy, clumsy, or dull. It became
like clay in the hands of a chemist, compact,
metaUic, brilliant. It possessed epigrammatic pith,
imaginative grace, daring piquancy. It could express
every hue of thought from the wildly droll
and fantastic to the sombre and the terrible.
In outlining Heine's achievements in five directions
— as humorist, as wit, as lyricist, as master of
prose, and as lover of freedom — George Ehot did
not hide the fact that there was brass and iron
and miry clay mingled with his precious gold, that
coarseness, scurrility, Mephistophelean contempt
for the reverent feehngs of other men interpenetrated
his exquisite poetry, wit, humor, and just
thought. But in the light of his magnificent quali-
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