“And yet, after all, no one can ever tell how things may turn out.  The grumpy Englishman, in an ill-temper with his wife, is capable of some day putting a rope round her neck, and taking her to be sold at Smithfield.  The inconstant Frenchman may become unfaithful to his adored mistress, and be seen fluttering about the Palais Royal after another. But the German will never quite abandon his old grandmother; he will always keep for her a nook by the chimney-corner, where she can tell her fairy stories to the listening children."[160]

Is it possible to touch more delicately and happily both the weakness and the strength of Germany; pedantic, simple, enslaved, free, ridiculous, admirable Germany?

And Heine’s verse,—­his Lieder? Oh, the comfort, after dealing with French people of genius, irresistibly impelled to try and express themselves in verse, launching out into a deep which destiny has sown with so many rocks for them,—­the comfort of coming to a man of genius, who finds in verse his freest and most perfect expression, whose voyage over the deep of poetry destiny makes smooth!  After the rhythm, to us, at any rate, with the German paste in our composition, so deeply unsatisfying, of—­

  “Ah! que me dites-vous, et qne vous dit mon ame? 
  Que dit le ciel a l’aube et la flamme a la flamme?”

what a blessing to arrive at rhythms like—­

  “Take, oh, take those lips away,
  That so sweetly were forsworn—­“[161]

or—­

  “Siehst sehr sterbeblaesslich aus,
  Doch getrost! du bist zu Haus—­“[162]

in which one’s soul can take pleasure!  The magic of Heine’s poetical form is incomparable; he chiefly uses a form of old German popular poetry, a ballad-form which has more rapidity and grace than any ballad-form of ours; he employs this form with the most exquisite lightness and ease, and yet it has at the same time the inborn fulness, pathos, and old-world charm of all true forms of popular poetry.  Thus in Heine’s poetry, too, one perpetually blends the impression of French modernism and clearness, with that of German sentiment and fulness; and to give this blended impression is, as I have said, Heine’s great characteristic.  To feel it, one must read him; he gives it in his form as well as in his contents, and by translation I can only reproduce it so far as his contents give it.  But even the contents of many of his poems are capable of giving a certain sense of it.  Here, for instance, is a poem in which he makes his profession of faith to an innocent beautiful soul, a sort of Gretchen, the child of some simple mining people having their hut among the pines at the foot of the Hartz Mountains, who reproaches him with not holding the old articles of the Christian creed:—­

“Ah, my child, while I was yet a little boy, while I yet sate upon my mother’s knee, I believed in God the Father, who rules up there in Heaven, good and great;