they would get at the Exhibition the grand medal for pain and misery.”  He read all the medical books which treated of his complaint.  “But,” said he to some one who found him thus engaged, “what good this reading is to do me I don’t know, except that it will qualify me to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth about diseases of the spinal marrow.”  What a matter of grim seriousness are our own ailments to most of us! yet with this gayety Heine treated his to the end.  That end, so long in coming, came at last.  Heine died on the 17th of February, 1856, at the age of fifty-eight.  By his will he forbade that his remains should be transported to Germany.  He lies buried in the cemetery of Montmartre, at Paris.

His direct political action was null, and this is neither to be wondered at nor regretted; direct political action is not the true function of literature, and Heine was a born man of letters.  Even in his favorite France the turn taken by public affairs was not at all what he wished, though he read French politics by no means as we in England, most of us, read them.  He thought things were tending there to the triumph of communism; and to a champion of the idea like Heine, what there is gross and narrow in communism was very repulsive.  “It is all of no use,” he cried on his death-bed, “the future belongs to our enemies, the Communists, and Louis Napoleon[151] is their John the Baptist.”  “And yet,”—­he added with all his old love for that remarkable entity, so full of attraction for him, so profoundly unknown in England, the French people,—­“do not believe that God lets all this go forward merely as a grand comedy.  Even though the Communists deny him to-day, he knows better than they do, that a time will come when they will learn to believe in him.”  After 1831, his hopes of soon upsetting the German Governments had died away, and his propagandism took another, a more truly literary, character.

It took the character of an intrepid application of the modern spirit to literature.  To the ideas with which the burning questions of modern life filled him, he made all his subject-matter minister.  He touched all the great points in the career of the human race, and here he but followed the tendency of the wide culture of Germany; but he touched them with a wand which brought them all under a light where the modern eye cares most to see them, and here he gave a lesson to the culture of Germany,—­ so wide, so impartial, that it is apt to become slack and powerless, and to lose itself in its materials for want of a strong central idea round which to group all its other ideas.  So the mystic and romantic school of Germany lost itself in the Middle Ages, was overpowered by their influence, came to ruin by its vain dreams of renewing them.  Heine, with a far profounder sense of the mystic and romantic charm of the Middle Age than Goerres, or Brentano, or Arnim,[152] Heine the chief romantic poet of Germany, is yet also much more than a romantic poet:  he is a great modern poet, he is not conquered by the Middle Age, he has a talisman by which he can feel—­along with but above the power of the fascinating Middle Age itself—­the power of modern ideas.