“’Conrad von der Rosen, my fool, when I am free, what wilt thou do then?’

“‘I will then sew new bells on to my cap.’

“‘And how shall I recompense thy fidelity?’

“‘Ah, dear master, by not leaving me to die in a ditch!’"[148]

I wish to mark Heine’s place in modern European literature, the scope of his activity, and his value.  I cannot attempt to give here a detailed account of his life, or a description of his separate works.  In May 1831 he went over his Jordan, the Rhine, and fixed himself in his new Jerusalem, Paris.  There, henceforward, he lived, going in general to some French watering-place in the summer, but making only one or two short visits to Germany during the rest of his life.  His works, in verse and prose, succeeded each other without stopping; a collected edition of them, filling seven closely-printed octavo volumes, has been published in America;[149] in the collected editions of few people’s works is there so little to skip.  Those who wish for a single good specimen of him should read his first important work, the work which made his reputation, the Reisebilder, or “Travelling Sketches”:  prose and verse, wit and seriousness, are mingled in it, and the mingling of these is characteristic of Heine, and is nowhere to be seen practised more naturally and happily than in his Reisebilder.  In 1847 his health, which till then had always been perfectly good, gave way.  He had a kind of paralytic stroke.  His malady proved to be a softening of the spinal marrow:  it was incurable; it made rapid progress.  In May 1848, not a year after his first attack, he went out of doors for the last time; but his disease took more than eight years to kill him.  For nearly eight years he lay helpless on a couch, with the use of his limbs gone, wasted almost to the proportions of a child, wasted so that a woman could carry him about; the sight of one eye lost, that of the other greatly dimmed, and requiring, that it might be exercised, to have the palsied eyelid lifted and held up by the finger; all this, and besides this, suffering at short intervals paroxysms of nervous agony.  I have said he was not preeminently brave; but in the astonishing force of spirit with which he retained his activity of mind, even his gayety, amid all his suffering, and went on composing with undiminished fire to the last, he was truly brave.  Nothing could clog that aerial lightness.  “Pouvez-vous siffler?” his doctor asked him one day, when he was almost at his last gasp;—­ “siffler,” as every one knows, has the double meaning of to whistle and to hiss:—­“Helas! non,” was his whispered answer; “pas meme une comedie de M. Scribe!” M. Scribe[150] is, or was, the favorite dramatist of the French Philistine.  “My nerves,” he said to some one who asked him about them in 1855, the year of the great Exhibition in Paris, “my nerves are of that quite singularly remarkable miserableness of nature, that I am convinced