who is totally unable to stand the test indicated in his poetical works even, to say nothing of his prose. There are other poets of Heine's calibre of whose writings we would not lose a word; but Byron, Burns, and Shelley did not subject themselves to the test which Heine successfully underwent of writing undying things in prose: philosophy, and criticism, and even politics.
If we must account for this singular distinction, we should say that Heine, more than any of the great men we have named, except Shelley, was a poet by the grace of God, and that he carried the happy instinct of his verse into his prose. As a poet he was essentially a Volksdichter—the same sort of person, that is to say, as the unknown musicians whose Border Minstrelsies and Spanish Cancioneros are the envy and admiration of an artificial age. Every such writer, besides the moral endowment of feeling and the sensuous endowment of melody, is necessarily equipped with two intellectual gifts, perfect lucidity and perfect proportion. Imagine such a man to be at the same time a most original and accurate thinker, and to possess in the discussion of grave matters the ease and brightness and symmetry which have constituted his charm as a lyric poet, and it
