"[163]
One has only to turn over the pages of his _Romancero_,[164]--a
collection of poems written in the first years of his illness, with his
whole power and charm still in them, and not, like his latest poems of
all, painfully touched by the air of his _Matrazzen-gruft_, his
"mattress-grave,"--to see Heine's width of range; the most varied
figures succeed one another,--Rhampsinitus,[165] Edith with the Swan
Neck,[166] Charles the First, Marie Antoinette, King David, a heroine of
_Mabille_, Melisanda of Tripoli,[167] Richard Coeur de Lion, Pedro the
Cruel[168], Firdusi[169], Cortes, Dr. Doellinger[170];--but never does
Heine attempt to be _hubsch objectiv_, "beautifully objective," to
become in spirit an old Egyptian, or an old Hebrew, or a Middle-Age
knight, or a Spanish adventurer, or an English royalist; he always
remains Heinrich Heine, a son of the nineteenth century. To give a
notion of his tone, I will quote a few stanzas at the end of the
_Spanish Atridae_[171] in which he describes, in the character of a
visitor at the court of Henry of Transtamare[172] at Segovia, Henry's
treatment of the children of his brother, Pedro the Cruel.
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