The parentage, the place, and the time were almost equally significant aspects of the constellation under which young Harry Heine—­for so he was first named—­began his earthly career.  He was born a Jew in a German city which, with a brief interruption, was for the first sixteen years of his life administered by the French.  The citizens of Duesseldorf in general had little reason, except for high taxes and the hardships incident to conscription in the French armies, to complain of the foreign dominion.  Their trade flourished, they were given better laws, and the machinery of justice was made much less cumbersome than it had been before.  But especially the Jews hailed the French as deliverers; for now for the first time they were relieved of political disabilities and were placed upon a footing of equality with the gentile population.  To Jew and gentile alike the military achievements of the French were a source of satisfaction and admiration; and when the Emperor of the French himself came to town, as Heine saw him do in 1810, we can easily understand how the enthusiasm of the boy surrounded the person of Napoleon, and the idea that he was supposed to represent, with a glamor that never lost its fascination for the man.  To Heine, Napoleon was the incarnation of the French Revolution, the glorious new-comer who took by storm the intrenched strongholds of hereditary privilege, the dauntless leader in whose army every common soldier carried a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack.  If later we find Heine mercilessly assailing the repressive and reactionary aristocracy of Germany, we shall not lightly accuse him of lack of patriotism.  He could not be expected to hold dear institutions of which he felt only the burden, without a share in the sentiment which gives stability even to institutions that have outlived their usefulness.  Nor shall we call him a traitor for loving the French, a people to whom his people owed so much, and to whom he was spiritually akin.

French influences, almost as early as Hebrew or German, were among the formative forces brought to bear upon the quick-witted but not precocious boy.  Heine’s parents were orthodox, but by no means bigoted Jews.  We read with amazement that one of the plans of the mother, ambitious for her firstborn, was to make of him a Roman Catholic priest.  The boy’s father, Samson Heine, was a rather unsuccessful member of a family which in other representatives—­particularly Samson’s brother Salomon in Hamburg—­attained to wealth and prominence in the world of finance.

[Illustration:  W. Krauskopf Heinrich Heine After a Drawing in the Possession of Mr. Carl Meinert in Dessau]