HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Heinrich Heine
8, 1888, wrote that his poetry was brewed of tears
and fire, of sundawn and moonlight, of flowers
and sea-foam, of rainbow-gold and heart's blood;
and that it did not matter one jot whether he who
brewed it was Jew or Christian, thankless or grateful,
a punctual payer of scot and lot and an estimable
family man or a Bohemian and a good-fornothing.
Alfred Schumacher prefaced a twentyfive
page essay on Heine, in the Manchester Quarterly
of 1900, with the remark that no German
poet, not even Goethe, had in that year an equally
wide circle of readers throughout the globe. Eight
years later, the Edinburgh Review voiced a similar
opinion on Heine's continuing vogue: "From
generation to generation his songs have touched
countless hearts, have brought to the simple and to
the wise, to the sad as to the happy, to youth with
its onlooking eyes of eagerness and hope, to age
with its backward gaze and spring-green memories,
the greatest gifts art can bring: a sense of quickened
emotion, a sense of a keener recognition of
the pulses of tenderness and passion that beat under
the gross material semblances of men's prosaic
life-days. . . . His songs are one long cry of distress,
broken with anger, vibrating with mockery;
they are threaded with a hopelessness that takes
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