HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

The Wandering Jew
own pain. Heine's lowly origin as a Jew and his
wretched life in a Hamburg counting-house and
in a Parisian garret were the antithesis to the imagined
world of Hellenic beauty and Olympian serenity:
"Had he entered the world as a wealthy, wellborn
Christian aristocrat, depend upon it, he would
never have written a line of verse — or, if a line
of verse, the world would not have recognized it
as poetry. He would have passed his life in realizing
all that he imagined, but never possessed. It
was his destiny, however, to become a permanent
representative of the pain which is born of contrast.
One great and everlasting form of human
suffering found in him its appropriate poet. . . .
In Heinrich Heine, what we have to deal with is
neither the mahgnity of the Jew, nor the envious
spite of the Pariah, nor the blasphemous execrations
of the wretch who writhes beneath the lash. It is
the sanctifying and redeeming power of Poesy, who
hath taken upon herself the sorrowfulness and the
sinfulness of all these; saving them from the filth
and mire of the material world, and uplifting the
glorious forms of them to dwell henceforth with
her in her own imperishable dominions." ®
William Stigand, in his two-volume biography
of Heine, in 1875, stressed the latter's Hellenism
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