HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
by Lord Houghton and Lord Lytton, George Eliot
and Matthew Arnold. He accepted their insight
into Heine's character and went beyond them in
his vivid and picturesque interpretations. He too
depicted a literary genius who was in soul an early
Hebrew, in spirit an ancient Greek, in mind a republican
of the nineteenth century. But his emphasis
was on this last aspect, on Heine as the exponent
of the yearning spirit of the post-Napoleonic
age and the clairvoyant seer of generations to come
when a world, emancipated from the iron leadingstrings
held by a privileged few, would march victoriously
on towards a perfect democracy. In the
nervous prose and in the magic verse of Heine,
Sharp heard an original strange voice laughing at
the sanctities of four thousand years. This laugh
was not a mere mockery, the ripple of which had
passed over the sea of humanity from all time. It
was for the first time the laugh of the modern man
who had reached the apparent summit of human
life and still did not see a Promised Land. Sharp's
Heine was a soldier in the van, fighting for the
liberation of humanity but sometimes allowing himself
unrestricted furloughs. He was the drummer
for a new order, waking Europe out of its sleep.
In this order, foreseen by Heine, nations would
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