German writer who ever thoroughly bewitched and enchanted me, curiously came back into my mind, from the intermittent exile of a quarter of a century, at the bidding of a gesture of Mr. Mencken to his flock and at the penny whistle piping of two or three pages at the end of his fourth series of "Prejudices," headed "Bilder aus schöner Zeit," jottings, merely, of things sweet to his memory, as thus:
The little pile of stones on the beach of Watling's Island, marking the place where Columbus landed. . . . The moon of the Caribbees, seen from a 1,000-ton British tramp. . . . A dull night in a Buffalo hotel, reading the American Revised Version of the New Testament. . . . The day I received the proofs of my first book. . . . A good-by on a Hoboken pier. . . . The Palace Hotel in Madrid.
When I read these pages I was touched, and I fell to thinking about Heine.
Was it because I too was brought up on the literature of Israel that I never had any difficulty in understanding Heine's humor, was never offended by it, even in its most irreverent sallies, and sympathized in the main heartily with his neo-paganism—his attempt to rediscover the goodness of this earthly life, and with all his efforts to free the Children of Light from Philistia's yoke, from the stodginess of missionary society culture and from the straitjacket of small-town theology?
Heine told me that the Quaker who bought up the loveliest mythological paintings of Giulio Romano in order to burn them deserved to be sent to heaven and whipped there every day for his pains. Heine wakened my apprehension of professors when he told me that
