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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Continuator of Goethe<br />

Vicar and Archdeacon and Bishop have laughed<br />

with inextinguishable laughter over Aristophanes<br />

and Lucian and Rabelais and Heine!" ^^<br />

Thomson, the embittered pessimist, probably exaggerated<br />

the opposition to Heine, whose defenders<br />

certainly outnumbered his detractors in England<br />

of the Eighteen-Sixties. Heine did not have<br />

the best repute but he was widely read. Robert Lytton<br />

testified that each new book of Heine's<br />

was received with hungry eagerness and feverish<br />

impetuosity.^^ Not all who read him admired his<br />

approach to religion and politics but none denied<br />

the power of his personality. He was for the mid-<br />

Victorians a literary force exceeding in vitality that<br />

of any other German save Goethe. And, as the continuator<br />

of Goethe, he enthralled this age of George<br />

Eliot and Matthew Amold.<br />

[81]

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