BOOKS.

HEINE'S REMAINS.* 111.asE, in one of the more valuable of these crumbs of table-talk or literary jottings which Herr Strodtmann has so carefully swept

• Letzte Gedichie vnd Gedanken tea Heinrich Heine. Aus den Nubian des Diehters zum ersten Male veniffentlicht. Hamburg. ISO. together to fill out this small volume, remarks that Paracelsus had proposed to classify flowers by their odours, and remarks how much more ingenious and original such a classification would be than Linnaeus's, which classified them by the stamens. And he goes on to suggest that it would not be by any means absurd to classify authors too by their odours, himself suggesting only two classes by way' of hint,—those who smell of tobacco, and those who smell of onions. Perhaps the suggestion partly proceeded from some feeling that in that case his own writings would stand apart in a class of their own, now reminding us of the delicious fragrance of the violet, now of the intolerable stench of the common sewer which strikes on the nerves something like a physical blow ; and then again losing at once both fragrance and foul odour, to reek as strongly of blood as ever did the sword of the soldier, the duellist, or the assassin,—for in turn Heine in his moods of literary rage seems to have been all three. These remains are, to any genuine critic of this wonderful poet, better worth reading, we think, than the English reviewers have hitherto represented them. They contain, indeed, very few indeed of the poet's exquisite lyrics, —very many of those bitter bits of mockery which are half-scorn for man and half-triumph over his own exposure of men's carnality,— diabolic gestures of foul meaning such as those whereby Mephisto- pheles throws cold water on the burning feelings of Faust; and not a few, again, of such fierce epigrammatic thrusts at his political con- temporaries as simply evinced the poet's profound scorn for every political phenomenon in this world except revolutionary power, whether democratic or absolutist. Heine was, in fact, a virulent political and religious atheist ; he could not brook the respect for laws and limits, whether political or religious, and for that very reason the deepest pathos of his poetry was a wail over the sense of limit, —a "lyrical cry" which came from the very depths of a most tender but fiercely insubordinate nature, and accused and mocked every element in the universe, itself included, for the weakness of the human heart. He delighted in grossness and nakedness rather as modes of revenging himself for the degradation of that which be had felt to be noblest, than as mere audacities of a sensual imagination which would respect no human restraint or reserve, however deeply rooted in our minds. Elaine's poetry ranges from the loveliest of wails to the most discordant of shrieks, and his prose, so far as it is not picture-painting, is for the most part devoted to giving a loose epigrammatic form to the theory by which he attempted to justify and interpret the spirit of his poetry. This volume, as is perhaps not unnatural in a volume of remains from which Heine had in his lifetime selected what he thought most worthy of publication, contains the lees of his thoughts and feelings,—the bitterest dregs of his revolutionary heart on all topics, and not unfrequently this bitterness is destitute of the power of his prime. But still it does contain too many flashes of that naked sword which always seemed to be brandished in his hand, to be read without interest. One of the most curious little pieces of this volume is the following prose rhapsody, headed " Hymnus," which we translate literally, not for its poetry, which is worthless,—for Heine was no Ossian,— but for its autobiographic truth :— " I am the sword, I am the flame ; "I have shone upon you in the twilight, and when the battle began I fought before you in the first line.

"Round about me lie the corpses of my friends, but we have con- quered. We have conquered, but round about lie the corpses of my friends. Under the exultant songs of triumph there wail the notes of funereal grief. But we have time neither for joy nor lamentation. The trumpets sound anew. There is new battle at hand.

"I am the sword, I am the flame."

And he was a sword and flame, though the sword was often cruel, and the flame almost always withering. You feel that a mind of wonderful power is really bare before you in every page of Heine as you read, and though many of its inmost thoughts are simply revolting, though many are savage, and all are inexpressibly hope- less, there is nothing in this book to give any fresh shock to anyone who knew Heine thoroughly as he appears in his other works, not a little to add to the vividness of our personal impression of this wonderful and terrible man, and a little that if it does not exactly add to his poetical reputation, yet does add to the poetical treasure with which he has enriched the world.

We need not touch upon the gross part of Heine, of which there is a great deal too much in this book, a great deal which is not justified by any gleam of intellectual genius at all. We regard it as proceeding, in him, chiefly from a sort of malice against human feeling—his own feelings in particular, which he knew to be at once tender and gross, pitiful and selfish, spiritual and brutal, — and he never could desist from taunting the better element in these feelings by the scoffing exposure of the satyr beneath. Bat of his vindictive derision of all religious and political faith this volume contains some virulent expressions. Take the following notes on religious philosophy which are placed in succession and are clearly continuous,—and let no one read them who shrinks from blasphemy, for Heine could not express his intense atheism without grinding his teeth in a fashion that sug- gests rather hatred of a God he could hardly help recognizing, than utter disbelief in one he had failed to find:—

" The thought of the personality of God as Spirit is precisely as absurd as coarse anthropomorphism; for spiritual attributes mean nothing, and are ridiculous, without bodily.—The God of the best spiritualists is a sort of air-exhausted space in the kingdom of Thought, lighted by Love, which, again, is a light reflected back from the world of sense.—The angel who paints caricatures is an image of the Pantheist who carries his God in his own breast —Necessity of Deism ; He and Louis Philippe are Both of them necessary, He is the Louis Philippe of Heaven."

Or take this vulgar outbreak of intense and malignant political scorn for a man who was infinitely Heine's superior in political insight, M. Louis Blanc,—a scorn arising in precisely the saute source as his insatiable aibniration for Napoleon, and also, we believe, in precisely the same source as his hatred of divine law,—namely, a passion for the naked flashes of arbitrary will, for c•rtps tre'tat morally and politically, and a thorough dislike of the non-possumus which springs from spiritual self-limitation in any form :— " I had never been able to look at his little head without being seized by a certain astonishment, not because I felt any wonder for the much knowledge of the little man,—no, on the contrary, he is entirely destitute of all science ; much rather I marvelled how in such a mite of a head so much nescience could find room ; I never understood how this borne diminutive skull was able to enclose those colossal masses of ignorance which he dealt out in so rich, nay, prodigal, a plenitude on every occasion,—there showed itself the Omnipotence of God."

That seems to us as vulgar as it is false and ferocious. No mind not capable of utter vulgarity would dwell so maliciously on a low stature ; indeed, if any one had ridiculed it in Heine's own idol, Napoleon, Heine would have held him up to withering as well as just contempt. What he really hated in the Provisional Government of 1848 was its perhaps even too magnanimous and certainly too fastidious self-limitation,—its abstinence from great sensational assertions of power. Heine entertained the same violent hatred for Wellington, partly for the same reason. Ile exulted in the pro- clamation of the Second Empire, on the ground that it undid the work of Waterloo. "The consequences," he wrote, in that tone of malice which in Heine, in spite of his great genius, was so often utterly vulgar, "of such a rehabilitation are infinite, and will certainly be wholesome for all the peoples of Europe,—especially for the Germans. It is only a pity that so many of the old Waterloo heroes have not lived to see this time. Their Achilles, the Duke of Wellington, had a sort of foretaste of it, and at the last Waterloo dinner which he celebrated with his myrmidons on the anniversary of the battle, it is said that his appear- ance was more miserable and caterwauling (katzenjiimmerlicher) than ever. Soon afterwards, too, he went to the dogs [Heine uses the contemptuous and vulgar word " verreckt," oftener used of brutes than of men], and John Bull stands beside his grave, scratching his ears and grumbling So I have saddled myself in vain with that monstrous burden of debt which compels me to work like a galley-slave,—what use to me now is the battle of Waterloo ? ' Yes, that battle has now lost its former injurious significance, and Waterloo is now only the name of a lost battle, nothing more, nothieg less, just like Crecy and Agincourt, or, to talk German, just like Jena and Austerlitz." It is hardly possible to express political malice against the cause of those who were intent on binding the arms of Napoleon and of the representative hero of the cause, with more violence and more vulgarity. When Heine was not in his lyrical mood, you find no trace of a poetical nature except the violence of the fever to which his blood was subject. Curiously enough, with all his hatred of the limited and con- stitutional class of statesmen, he is comparatively polite to Guizot. In this book be says of him merely that his most prominent characteristic is his pride. "When he gets to heaven and comes to the dear God, he will compliment the latter on having created him so well."

But though there are worse and more detestable things in this book than any we have touched on, there are many better too. The lines headed "Where ?" on the place of his burial, are sweet with the fullest lyrical sweetness of his exquisite songs. The longer poem called " Remembrance " has a power of passion in it he has rarely surpassed. The sketch of the voyage of discovery undertaken by Ponce de Leon, first Governor of Cuba, in search of Bimini—the island where the waters of perpetual youth are to be found, has a quaint and rich picturesqueness quite in the vein

of his "Pictures of Travel ;" and there are one or two both of the mocking and the earnest love-poems that are worthy of Heine's best days. Take this, for a specimen of the former kind :—

We will give one specimen of Heine's finer and more truly lyrical vein,—where he contests the ground even with Goethe, and cer- tainly surpasses him in passionate pathos, —though in poems of this kind the " Remains " are by no means rich. The following, the last of a series headed " Kitty," has the real touch of the poet:— That seems to us to have the true pathos and sweetness of Heine in it, such pathos and such sweetness as no other poet known to us throws iu equal measure into his lyrics. Were they but all thus

"Das macht don Menschen gliick- lich Das macht den Menschen matt, Wenn or drei sehr schone Geliebte Und nur zwei Mine hat.

"Der Einen lauf ich des Morgens Der Andorn des Abends nach ; Die dritte kommt zu mir des Mit- tags Wohl unter mom eignes Hach.

"Lebt wohl ihr drei Geliebten Ich hab' zwei Bohm nur, Ich will in liindlicher Stifle Geniessen die whittle Natur."

"It makes a fellow happy, It fags a fellow out,

To have, with three fair sweet- hearts, But two legs to run about.

"To one I trudge before noon, To one I trudge at eve,

The third comes to me at midday Without by your leave.'

"Farewell, ye throe dear sweet- hearts !

Two legs, no more, have I,— I go to the quiet country.

On Nature's lap to lie."

".Has Gliick das gestern mich gekiisst 1st haute scion zerronnen Und trona Liebe hab' ich uie Auf lange Zeit gewormon.

"Die Neugier hat wohl mauchesWeib In meineu Arm gezogon, Hat sie mir mat ins Herz geschaut 1st sio davon geflogen.

"Die eine haute eh' sie ging,

Die andre that erblassen ; Nur Kitty wointe bitterlich Bever sio mich verlassen." "The joy that kissed me yesterday Is fled already now, No true love have I over won Long constant to its vow.

A dubious spell has drawn to me Women, aye, many a ono, But as each gazes in my heart, She gazes and is gone!

"And ono would laugh before she went, And one turn ashy white ; But Kitty wept a bitter flood Before site took her flight."