Samson Heine seems to have been too easy-going, self-indulgent, and ostentatious, to have made the most of the talents that he unquestionably had.  Among his foibles was a certain fondness for the pageantry of war, and he was in all his glory as an officer of the local militia.  To his son Gustav he transmitted real military capacity, which led to a distinguished career and a patent of nobility in the Austrian service.  Harry Heine inherited his father’s more amiable but less strenuous qualities.  Inquisitive and alert, he was rather impulsive than determined, and his practical mother had her trials in directing him toward preparation for a life work, the particular field of which neither she nor he could readily choose.  Peira, or Betty, Heine was a stronger character than her husband; and in her family, several members of which had taken high rank as physicians, there had prevailed a higher degree of intellectual culture than the Heines had attained to.  She not only managed the household with prudence and energy, but also took the chief care of the education of the children.  To both parents Harry Heine paid the homage of true filial affection; and of the happiness of the home life, The Book Le Grand and a number of poems bear unmistakable witness.  The poem “My child, we were two children” gives a true account of Harry and his sister Charlotte at play.

In Duesseldorf, Heine’s formal education culminated in attendance in the upper classes of a Lyceum, organized upon the model of a French Lycee and with a corps of teachers recruited chiefly from the ranks of the Roman Catholic clergy.  The spirit of the institution was rationalistic and the discipline wholesome.  Here Heine made solid acquisitions in history, literature, and the elements of philosophy.  Outside of school, he was an eager spectator, not merely of stirring events in the world of politics, but also of many a picturesque manifestation of popular life—­a spectator often rather than a participant; for as a Jew he stood beyond the pale of both the German and the Roman Catholic traditions that gave and give to the cities of the Rhineland their characteristic naive gaiety and harmless superstition.  Such a poem as The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar would be amazing as coming from an unbeliever, did we not see in it evidence of the poet’s capacity for perfect sympathetic adoption of the spirit of his early environment.  The same is true of many another poetic expression of simple faith, whether in Christianity or in the mythology of German folk-lore.

Interest in medieval Catholicism and in folk-lore is one of the most prominent traits in the Romantic movement, which reached its culmination during the boyhood of Heine.  The history of Heine’s connection with this movement is foreshadowed by the circumstances of his first contact with it.  He tells us that the first book he ever read was Don Quixote (in the translation by Tieck).  At about the same time he read Gulliver’s Travels,