HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
the most famous of the young German literary set.
He has a good deal of power, though more trick;
however, he has thoroughly disgusted me. The
Byronism of a German, of a man trying to be
gloomy, cynical, impassioned, moquer, etc., all a la
fois, with their honest bonhommistic language and
total want of experience of the kind that Lord
Byron, an English peer with access everywhere,
possessed, is the most ridiculous thing in the world.
... I see the French call this Heine a 'Voltaire au
clair de lune,' which is very happy." ^^
Ten years later, however, Arnold's attitude, hke
that of most Enghshmen, had undergone a change.
On September 14, 1858, he visited Montmartre
Cemetery in Paris, where Heine had been buried in
1856, and he was stimulated to begin his poem,
Heine's Grave. On March 9, 1861, he recommended
to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough the reading
of Heine as more profitable than the reading
of Tennyson.^^ Throughout 1862 and the first
months of 1863 he was at work on his elegy on
Heine. He completed it in April of the latter year,
although it was not published until 1867. In 1863
Arnold also prepared for his Oxford audience a
lecture on Heine. In a letter of May 14, he stated
his object to be not so much to give a literary his-
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