“Who created the beautiful earth, and the beautiful men and women thereon; who ordained for sun, moon, and stars their courses.

“When I got bigger, my child, I comprehended yet a great deal more than this, and comprehended, and grew intelligent; and I believe on the Son also;

“On the beloved Son, who loved us, and revealed love to us; and, for his reward, as always happens, was crucified by the people.

“Now, when I am grown up, have read much, have travelled much, my heart swells within me, and with my whole heart I believe on the Holy Ghost.

“The greatest miracles were of his working, and still greater miracles doth he even now work; he burst in sunder the oppressor’s stronghold, and he burst in sunder the bondsman’s yoke.

“He heals old death-wounds, and renews the old right; all mankind are one race of noble equals before him.

“He chases away the evil clouds and the dark cobwebs of the brain, which have spoilt love and joy for us, which day and night have loured on us.

“A thousand knights, well harnessed, has the Holy Ghost chosen out to fulfil his will, and he has put courage into their souls.

“Their good swords flash, their bright banners wave; what, thou wouldst give much, my child, to look upon such gallant knights?

“Well, on me, my child, look! kiss me, and look boldly upon me! one of those knights of the Holy Ghost am I."[163]

One has only to turn over the pages of his Romancero,[164]—­a collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of all, painfully touched by the air of his Matrazzen-gruft, his “mattress-grave,”—­to see Heine’s width of range; the most varied figures succeed one another,—­Rhampsinitus,[165] Edith with the Swan Neck,[166] Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of Mabille, Melisanda of Tripoli,[167] Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the Cruel[168], Firdusi[169], Cortes, Dr. Doellinger[170];—­but never does Heine attempt to be hubsch objectiv, “beautifully objective,” to become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century.  To give a notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the Spanish Atridae[171] in which he describes, in the character of a visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare[172] at Segovia, Henry’s treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel.  Don Diego Albuquerque, his neighbor, strolls after dinner through the castle with him:—­

“In the cloister-passage, which leads to the kennels where are kept the king’s hounds, that with their growling and yelping let you know a long way off where they are,

“There I saw, built into the wall, and with a strong iron grating for its outer face, a cell like a cage.