“Certainly nothing more than was right.”

“If that were true, the intended compliment would be rather rude—­But see the buoys yonder, how they swim and dance.  The little red flags are hauled in.  Every time I have seen the red flags this summer, the few times that I have ventured to go down to the beach, I have said to myself:  there lies Vineta, it must lie there, those are the tops of the towers.”

“That is because you know Heine’s poem.”

“Which one?”

“Why, the one about Vineta.”

“No, I don’t know that one; indeed I know very few, to my sorrow.”

“And yet you have Gieshuebler and the Journal Club.  However, Heine gave the poem a different name, ‘Sea Ghosts,’ I believe, or something of the sort.  But he meant Vineta.  As he himself—­pardon me, if I proceed to tell you here the contents of the poem—­as the poet, I was about to say, is passing the place, he is lying on the ship’s deck and looking down into the water, and there he sees narrow, medieval streets, and women tripping along in hoodlike hats.  All have songbooks in their hands and are going to church, and all the bells are ringing.  When he hears the bells he is seized with a longing to go to church himself, even though only for the sake of the hoodlike hats, and in the heat of desire he screams aloud and is about to plunge in.  But at that moment the captain seizes him by the leg and exclaims:  ’Doctor, are you crazy?’”

“Why, that is delicious!  I’d like to read it.  Is it long?”

“No, it is really short, somewhat longer than ’Thou hast diamonds and pearls,’ or ‘Thy soft lily fingers,’” and he gently touched her hand.  “But long or short, what descriptive power, what objectivity!  He is my favorite poet and I know him by heart, little as I care in general for this poetry business, in spite of the jingles I occasionally perpetrate myself.  But with Heine’s poetry it is different.  It is all life, and above everything else he is a connoisseur of love, which, you know, is the highest good.  Moreover, he is not one-sided.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he is not all for love.”

“Well, even if he had this one-sidedness it would not be the worst thing in the world.  What else does he favor?”

“He is also very much in favor of romance, which, to be sure, follows closely after love and, in the opinion of some people, coincides with it.  But I don’t believe it does.  In his later poems, which have been called ’romantic’—­as a matter of fact, he called them that himself—­in these romantic poems there is no end of killing.  Often on account of love, to be sure, but usually for other, more vulgar reasons, among which I include politics, which is almost always vulgar.  Charles Stuart, for example, carries his head under his arm in one of these romances, and still more gruesome is the story of Vitzliputzli.”

“Of whom?”

“Vitzliputzli.  He is a Mexican god, and when the Mexicans had taken twenty or thirty Spaniards prisoners, these twenty or thirty had to be sacrificed to Vitzliputzli.  There was no help for it, it was a national custom, a cult, and it all took place in the turn of a hand—­belly open, heart out—­”