HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Continuator of Goethe
translations of Goethe and Schiller with one of
Heine, the Dublin University Magazine, in a nine
page review in its issue of November, 1859, commended
him for undertaking this task because, since
Goethe, no poet had wielded a power like that of
Heine.^^
The tradition of Heine as the continuator of
Goethe was rapidly being formed. George Ehot
had lent it its original impetus, but it was Matthew
Amold who gave it its most impressive expression
and greatest vogue. Ralph Waldo Emerson's reference
to Heine in 1862 as a quack and charlatan
was the last gasp of a dying tradition, the last lapping
of the anti-Heine wave that swept westward
from Germany a generation earher and that in England
still claimed the allegiance of Thomas Carlyle
and Charles Kingsley.^^ Arnold's essay in Cornhill
Magazine of August, 1863, was the highest crest
of the new wave of adoration that surged over mid-
Victorian England.
Arnold's first reading of Heine dated back to the
revolutionary year 1848 and his first impression
was one of annoyance. In a letter to his mother on
May 7,1848, he wrote: "I have just finished a German
book I brought with me here: a mkture of
poems and travelling journal by Heinrich Heine,
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