in order by the aid of magic to kill the bear and therewith the vogue
of poetry degraded to practical purposes. Heine knew whereof he
spoke; for he had himself been a mad romanticist, a Young German, and
a political poet; and he was a true prophet; for, though he did not
himself enter the promised land, he lived to see, in the more refined
romanticism of the Munich School and the poetic realism of Hebbel and
Ludwig, the dawn of a new day in the history of German literature.

Heine did not enter the promised land. Neither can we truthfully say
that he saw it as it was destined to be. His eye was on the present,
and in the present he more clearly discerned what ought not to be than
what gave promise of a better future. In the war for the liberation of
humanity he professed to be, and he was, a brave soldier; but he
lacked the soldier's prime requisite, discipline. He never took a
city, because he could not rule his spirit. Democracy was inscribed
upon his banner, sympathy for the disenfranchised bound him to it, but
not that charity which seeketh not her own, nor the loyalty that
abides the day when imperfection shall become perfection. Sarcasm was
his weapon, ridicule his plan of campaign, and destruction his only
accomplishment.

We shall not say that the things destroyed by Heine deserved a better
fate. We shall not think of him either as a leader or as a follower in
a great national movement. He was not the one man of his generation
through whom the national consciousness, even national discontent,
found expression; he was the man whose self-expressions aroused the
widest interest and touched the tenderest chords. To be called perhaps
an alien, and certainly no monumental German character, Heine
nevertheless made use, with consummate artistry, of the fulness of
German culture at a time when many of the after-born staggered under