Book Description

From the PREFACE. I BECAME acquainted with Heinrich Heine towards the close of his life. His poems and writings were familiar to me many years previous to my meeting him for the first time face to face. "I arrived from Vienna, bringing with me a small parcel, containing a few sheets of music sent by one of his admirers. "To ensure safe delivery, I carried it myself to his abode, and, after handing it to the servant, was turning away, when a sharp ring resounded from the adjoining room. The domestic answered it, and I was startled by hearing a somewhat imperious voice forbidding my departure. A door opened and I entered a very dark room, where I stumbled against a screen covered with coloured paper in imitation of lacker. Behind this screen a man, sick and half blind, lay stretched upon a low couch; though no longer young, he still appeared so, and his face bore traces of former beauty;' Imagine, if you can, the smile of Mephistopheles passing over the face of Christ — Christ draining the dregs of the chalice. The invalid raised himself on his pillows and held out his hand, saying it gratified him to converse with anybody arriving from 'yonder.' A sigh accompanied this touching 'yonder,' which was breathed from his lips, like the echo of a distant and well- known melody. Friendship progresses rapidly when begun beside a sick couch and in the proximity of death. When I left, he gave me a book and begged me to visit him again. I thought it was a mere polite formula, and kept away, fearing to disturb the invalid. He wrote me a scolding letter. The reproof both touched and flattered me, and my visits henceforth ceased only on the sad February morning when we accompanied him to his last home!" The above few lines, whilst explaining how I first knew Heinrich Heine, serve as an introduction to a sketch depicting the last days of his life. When more than fifteen years ago this fragment appeared in the "Revue Nationale," I did not intend using the manuscripts, the translation of which forms the principal interest of this book. Youth has its reservations and egoisms, which middle-age condemns. Now that time and circumstances have modified my ideas and cancelled my scruples, I consider that I no longer possess any right to withhold certain writings, which, although addressed to me, form none the less part of Heinrich Heine's works, and may, by completing the story of his life, increase the poet's fame.