advantage of being himself a man of no genius, so that those transgressions seem to him quite gratuitous; he, forsooth, never lacerated any one by his wit, or gave irresistible piquancy to a coarse allusion, and his indignation is not mitigated by any knowledge of the temptation that lies in transcendent power....

In Heine’s hands German prose, usually so heavy, so clumsy, so dull, becomes, like clay in the hands of the chemist, compact, metallic, brilliant; it is German in an allotropic condition.  No dreary, labyrinthine sentences in which you find “no end in wandering mazes lost;” no chains of adjectives in linked harshness long drawn out; no digressions thrown in as parentheses; but crystalline definiteness and clearness, fine and varied rhythm, and all that delicate precision, all those felicities of word and cadence, which belong to the highest order of prose.  And Heine has proved that it is possible to be witty in German; indeed, in reading him, you might imagine that German was pre-eminently the language of wit, so flexible, so subtle, so piquant does it become under his management.  He is far more an artist in prose than Goethe.  He has not the breadth and repose, and the calm development which belongs to Goethe’s style, for they are foreign to his mental character; but he excels Goethe in susceptibility to the manifold qualities of prose, and in mastery over its effects.  Heine is full of variety, of light and shadow:  he alternates between epigrammatic pith, imaginative grace, sly allusion, and daring piquancy; and athwart all those there runs a vein of sadness, tenderness and grandeur which reveals the poet.

The introduction to this article contains a wise comparison of wit and humor, and makes a subtle discrimination between them.  German wit she finds is heavy and lacking in nicety of perception; and the German is the only nation that “had contributed nothing classic to the common stock of European wit and humor” previous to the present century.  In Heine she found both in a marked degree, so that he is unlike the other writers of Germany, having a flavor and a spirit quite his own.

Her essays on Dr. Cumming and the poet Young were largely of a theological character.  They are keen in their thrusts at dogmatic religion, sparkling with witty hits at a make-believe piety, and full of biting sarcasm.  Her entire want of sympathy with the men she dissects, makes her sometimes unjust to them, and she makes them worse than they really were.  The terrible vigor of her criticism may be seen in her description of Dr. Cumming and his teaching.  She brings three charges against him, and defends each with ample quotation, wit, sarcasm, argument and eloquence.  She finds in his books unscrupulosity of statement, absence of genuine charity, and a perverted moral judgment.  These essays much resemble Thackeray’s dissection of Swift for their terrible sarcasm, their unmerciful criticism, and their minute unveiling of