HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heiruich Heine
wines, if I myself, while these ovations are going
on, lonely and cut off from the pleasures of the
world, can only just wet my lips with barleywater?
What good does it do me that all the roses
of Shiraz open their leaves and burn for me with
passionate tenderness? Alas! Shiraz is some two
thousand leagues from the Rue d'Amsterdam,
where in the solitude of my sick chamber all the
perfume I smell is that of hot towels." Heine, the
champion of paganism and materialism, thus demonstrated
most poignantly that Christianity, the religion
of sorrow and spiritualism, had more to offer
man in the deepest reaches of his soul, in his hours
of adversity, and that it was, therefore, a surer stay
for the masses, whose fives abounded in hardships.
English critics agreed with Arnold that Heine's
striving after the blithe classic temper was a failure
and that he did not sit on the heights of Olympus
by natural right — for his abode was nearer to
Sinai. It was generally recognized that the statuesque
calm of Sophocles had not been granted him
and that the atmosphere about his works was not
the dehcate air of Athens but rather the enchanted
ah: of medieval romance or the Hebraic air heavy
with the sighs of innumerable generations that
stood beside the Wailing Wall of Jemsalem. His
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