Writing to him again, his father speaks of something that Karl had written as “a mad composition, which denotes clearly how you waste your ability and spend nights in order to create such monstrosities.”  The young man was even forbidden to return home for the Easter holidays.  This meant giving up the sight of Jenny, whom he had not seen for a whole year.  But fortune arranged it otherwise; for not many weeks later death removed the parent who had loved him and whom he had loved, though neither of them could understand the other.  The father represented the old order of things; the son was born to discontent and to look forward to a new heaven and a new earth.

Returning to Berlin, Karl resumed his studies; but as before, they were very desultory in their character, and began to run upon social questions, which were indeed setting Germany into a ferment.  He took his degree, and thought of becoming an instructor at the university of Jena; but his radicalism prevented this, and he became the editor of a liberal newspaper, which soon, however, became so very radical as to lead to his withdrawal.

It now seemed best that Marx should seek other fields of activity.  To remain in Germany was dangerous to himself and discreditable to Jenny’s relatives, with their status as Prussian officials.  In the summer of 1843, he went forth into the world—­at last an “international.”  Jenny, who had grown to believe in him as against her own family, asked for nothing better than to wander with him, if only they might be married.  And they were married in this same summer, and spent a short honeymoon at Bingen on the Rhine—­made famous by Mrs. Norton’s poem.  It was the brief glimpse of sunshine that was to precede year after year of anxiety and want.

Leaving Germany, Marx and Jenny went to Paris, where he became known to some of the intellectual lights of the French capital, such as Bakunin, the great Russian anarchist, Proudhon, Cabet, and Saint-Simon.  Most important of all was his intimacy with the poet Heine, that marvelous creature whose fascination took on a thousand forms, and whom no one could approach without feeling his strange allurement.

Since Goethe’s death, down to the present time, there has been no figure in German literature comparable to Heine.  His prose was exquisite.  His poetry ran through the whole gamut of humanity and of the sensations that come to us from the outer world.  In his poems are sweet melodies and passionate cries of revolt, stirring ballads of the sea and tender love-songs—­strange as these last seem when coming from this cynic.

For cynic he was, deep down in his heart, though his face, when in repose, was like the conventional pictures of Christ.  His fascinations destroyed the peace of many a woman; and it was only after many years of self-indulgence that he married the faithful Mathilde Mirat in what he termed a “conscience marriage.”  Soon after he went to his “mattress-grave,” as he called it, a hopeless paralytic.