HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

and complained that everything he ate was like clay.
His physicians agreed that he had few weeks to live,
and he felt that he was dying, little divining that the
agony was to be prolonged for ten horrible years. It is
unnecessary to dwell upon these years of darkness, in
which Heine, shriveled to the proportions of a child,
languished upon his "mattress-grave" in Paris. His patient
resignation, his indomitable will, his sweetness
and gayety of temper, and his unimpaired vigor and
fertility of intellect, are too fresh in the memory of
many witnesses, and have been too frequently described
to make it needful here to enlarge upon them.
In the crucial hour he proved no recreant to the convictions
for which he had battled and bled during a
lifetime. Of the report that his illness had materially
modified his religious opinions, he has left a complete
and emphatic denial. "I must expressly contradict
the rumor that I have retreated to the threshold
of any sort of church, or that I have reposed upon its
bosom. No! My religious views and convictions have
remained free from all churchdom; no belfry chime has
allured me, no altar taper has dazzled me. I have trifled
with no symbol, and have not utterly renounced my
reason. I have forsworn nothing—not even my old
pagan-gods, from whom it is true I have parted, but
parted in love and friendship."
"I am no longer a divine biped," he wrote. "I am
no longer the freest German after Goethe, as Ruge
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