Paris; driven about by their tribunes as by storms. The poet, half-
blind, half-lame, dragged himself on his stick and endeavoured to
extricale himself from the deafening uproar, and finally escaped
into the Louvre, close by. . . . Ere long he found himself in the
room on the ground floor in which the ancient gods and goddesses
stand.

"Saddenly he stood before the ideal of Beauty, the smiling en-
trancing goddess, the miracle of unknown master, the Venus of
Milo, who in the course of centuries has lost her arms but not her
witchery. Overcome, agitated, stricken through, almost terrified
at her aspect, the sick man staggered back till he sank on a seat,
and tears, hot and bitter, streamed down his cheeks."

It was but fitting that this last visit of Heine to the
outer world should have been to the Goddess of Beauty,
whose thrall he ever was and whose songs he had sung
ever since the far-off days when, as a child, he had
wandered by the banks of the Düssel, or had listened to
the secrets of the birds in that fivourite haunt of his
among the green alleys of the Schlossgarten.

From that day forward the poet never left his bed
save when, for change of position, his nurse lifted him
from it as she would a child, and placed him in an arm-
chair propped up with cushions.

Heine's death-in-life had begun: henceforth he was
to know the bitterness of a mattress-rave. Yet from
this malrazzen-gruft, as he himself called it, his voice
was still to arise clear and strangely sweet and wild,
as from the depths of the Mammoth Caverns thrills at
times the song of a sightless bird.

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