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HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

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Heinrich Heine<br />

f eited with narionalism and racism, took to its heart?<br />

He was all these and much more. As each generation,<br />

past and present, read its longings and fears,<br />

its ideals and its aversions, into his personality, so<br />

hkewise will generations yet unborn continue to<br />

wrestle with the mystery of his being and will find<br />

ever more facets in it. They will not fail to thrill to<br />

the magic of his verses and to the rhythmic power<br />

of his prose and they will again and again re-interpret<br />

his challenging ideas in the light of their own<br />

as yet unpredictable experiences.<br />

And the real Heine?<br />

The dust that became incandescent and sentient,<br />

that flared for a moment in spiritual brightness, and<br />

that then returned to the earth — is it any more<br />

real than the image which lightning-like flashed<br />

through the mind of Matthew Arnold, as he stood<br />

beside the grave on Montmartre, and stirred this<br />

mind to elegiac verses aglow with beauty? Is it<br />

any more real than the vision which inspired George<br />

Eliot to pen her most memorable essay, or the ghost<br />

which haunted James Thomson as he strode through<br />

the City of Dreadful Night, or the phantom which<br />

caused an upsurge of hate in the heart of Carlyle<br />

and an upsurge of love in the hearts of Emma Lazarus<br />

and Olive Schreiner?<br />

[176]

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