HEINRICH HEINE - Repositories

Bard of Democracy
had meant most to James Thomson, and she identified
herself with them in a personal way. She felt
that the real Heine, the infinitely burning, tender,
passionate heart, could be known only to a few
and that she was of those few to whom he spoke
heart to heart. In a letter of April 21, 1884, addressed
to Havelock Ellis, she wrote concerning
Heine: "I personify myself with him. I know how
and why he wrote every line that he did write.
There is more depth and passion in one of his sneers,
more quivering tenderness veiled under it, than in
the outcries of half the world. I feel that I owe a
debt of personal gratitude to the girl who comforted
him in his mattress-grave." ^^ Twenty-two
years later, she elaborated this last thought in a letter
of September 10, 1906. After telling her correspondent
of her life-long interest in Heine, especially
the later Heine, "that beautiful bright joyloving
soul dying away by inches and fighting to
the end," she continued: "If only I could have been
that woman who went to him at the end and
cheered and comforted him. The very name of the
Rue d'Amsterdam is to me sacred because he lay
there. I know that other men have suffered but not
just so, because he was in a way alone to the end.
If anyone showed me a lock of hair and said 'That
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