Uncle Salomon, to whom the Tragedies had been affectionately inscribed, was not displeased with the growing literary reputation of his nephew.  But he saw no sense in the idea that Heine already entertained of settling in Paris.  He insisted that the young man should complete his studies; and so, in January, 1824, Heine once more betook himself to Goettingen, where on the twenty-first of July, 1825, he was duly promoted Doctor utriusque Juris.  In the summer of 1824 he made the trip through the Hartz mountains which served as the basis of The Journey to the Hartz; immediately before his promotion he submitted to baptism in the Lutheran church as Christian Johann Heinrich Heine.

Submission is the right word for this conversion.  It was an act of expediency such as other ambitious men found unavoidable in those days; but Heine performed it in a spirit of bitterness caused not so much by a sense of apostasy as by contempt for the conventional Christianity that he now embraced.  There can be no sharper contrast than that presented by such a poem as The Pilgrimage to Kevlaar and sundry satirical pieces not included in this volume.

Two vacations at Norderney, where Heine renewed and deepened acquaintance with his beloved North Sea, not very resolute attempts to take up the practice of law in Hamburg, a trip to London, vain hopes of a professorship in Munich, a sojourn in Italy, vacillations between Hamburg, Berlin, and the North Sea, complete the narrative of Heine’s movements to the end of the first period of his life.  He was now Heine the writer:  poet, journalist, and novelist. The Journey to the Hartz, first published in a magazine, Der Gesellschafter, in January and February, 1826, was issued in May of that year by Campe in Hamburg, as the first volume of Pictures of Travel, beginning with the poems of The Return Home and concluding with the first group of hymns to the North Sea, written at Norderney in the previous year. Pictures of Travel II, issued in 1827, consisted of the second cycle of poems on the North Sea, an account in prose of life on the island, entitled Norderney, The Book Le Grand, to which epigrams by Immermann were appended, and extracts from Letters from Berlin published in 1822. Pictures of Travel III (1830) began with experiences in Italy, but degenerated into a provoked but ruthless attack upon Platen. Pictures of Travel IV (1831) included English Fragments, the record of Heine’s observations in London, and The City of Lucca, a supplementary chapter on Italy.  In October, 1827, Heine collected under the title Book of Songs nearly all of his poems written up to that time.

The first period in Heine’s life closes with the year 1831.  The Parisian revolution of July, 1830, had turned the eyes of all Europe toward the land in which political experiments are made for the benefit of mankind.  Many a German was attracted thither, and not without reason Heine hoped to find there a more promising field for the employment of his talents than with all his wanderings he had discovered in Germany.  Toward the end of May, 1831, he arrived in Paris, and Paris was thenceforth his home until his death on the seventeenth of February, 1856.