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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Heinrich Heine<br />

upon the imagination of English disciples. Baron<br />

Rennell Rodd, who included a considerable number<br />

of translations from Heine in his own collection<br />

of poems, published in 1888 under the title The<br />

Unknown Madonna, introduced his English version<br />

of the immortal lyrics with the following lines:<br />

Faint echoes of a voice that sung<br />

The song of every day.<br />

With music at the bitter tongue<br />

That took the sting away:<br />

For sweeter singer never smote<br />

On such a simple lyre.<br />

Nor stayed on such a simple note<br />

The fugitive desire.<br />

The voice is hushed that battled long<br />

With passion and with pain.<br />

But from the fount of living song<br />

The echoes rise again.<br />

Two years earlier, on the tenth anniversary of<br />

Heine's death in Parisian exile, Henry C. Irwin<br />

paid tribute to him as the non-German, as the singer<br />

of the revolutionary spirit whose home was in the<br />

French capital:<br />

Sound sleep the dead who lie in German earth:<br />

So saidst thou, but O Heine, not for thee<br />

Such sleep as theirs. Save love for Germany<br />

Little in thee was German. At thy birth<br />

Large wealth of scorn, unconquerable mirth<br />

[140]

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