From De Musset to Heine the transition is indeed slight, for both men were simultaneously the representative poets of their respective countries in this century; and, like De Musset, Heine was the poet of youth and love. We therefore pass those sentences in which Madame Jaubert speaks of Pierre Lanfrey, the historian and political writer, to stop at the more interesting pages dedicated to her reminiscences of Heine, and the letters she received from him.

She made his acquaintance at a ball in the beginning of 1835. He then looked younger than his age (thirty-five), which he used to state laughingly, by affirming he was the

first man of his century. He spoke French with some slight difficulty, giving to his thoughts, nevertheless, a piquant form and dress. An animated conversation commenced, in which Heine expressed his disapproval of and impatience at the hackneyed admiration of the French for such idols as Goethe and Byron, when they had un poëte par excellence of their own, such as De Musset, whose writings were almost unknown; and this was in fact the case at that date.* The interest of the conversation was doubtless not all on one side, and was such as led the poet to wish for further knowledge of the spirituelle little lady. The result was the beginning of their long correspondence and intimacy, which lasted till his life's close. The prelude was the following letter, and the envoi of one of Heine's works :

"I have the honour, madam, to send you herewith my book on Germany. I invite you to read the Part 6th. I speak in it of ondines, salamanders, gnomes, and sylphs. I am well aware that my information on these is very incomplete, albeit I have read in their original tongues the works of the great Aureolus, Theophrastus, Paracelsus, Bombastus de Hohenheim. But when I wrote my book, I had never seen any of these elementary spirits. I even doubted their being aught else than the creations of our own imaginations, haunting in the elements. ing rather men's dreams than dwellSince the

day before yesterday, however, I believe in the reality of their existence. I saw a foot the day before yesterday which can belong only to one of these beings of fantasy of whom I have spoken in my book; but is it an ondine's ? I fancy it must glide like water, and might very well dance on the waves. Or does it belong to a salamander? It is not cold,' sayst

66

la Sorbonne, about this time brought une étoile qui se lève."

Joseph Marteau to Geneviève when the fair fleuriste's foot sets fire to his imagination. Perhaps it is the foot of a gnome; it is small, pretty, and high-bred enough for that. Or maybe it is the foot of a sylph ? She to whom it belongs is indeed so aerial, so fairy-like. . . . Is she a good or a wicked fairy? I know not; and the doubt worries me, makes me anxious, and weighs upon me. It's true. I am not jesting.

"Whereby you will perceive, madam, that I am not sufficiently an adept in occult science-that I am no great conjuror, but only your very humble and obedient servant,

"April 22, 1835."

"HENRI HEINE.

The doubt which Heine thus ex

pressed as to kindness being perhaps wanting in Madame Jaubert was identical, oddly enough, with a feeling she harboured against him, and which long prevented her from entering fully and freely into friendship with him. His sharp sayings produced on her from the first an unpleasant impression, which all his charm of wit and imagination even had much to do to counterbalance. Yet he was invaluable, she tells us, in her salon, where he animated all and everything with his shining mind, which was, as it were, spangled. The drawback to this precious element in her circle was his incisive and unfailing irony, which found victims he relentlessly showed up; and that, with characteristical German persistency, he unremittingly pursued, to the dismay of the hostess. whole and devoted friendship, united to her admiration, was obtained later on, at the sight of his intolerable sufferings, borne with the noblest fortitude. Every successive and aggravated ill that befell him was accepted bravely, gaily indeed,

Her

with a jest that rendered it difficult for his friends to treat seriously what he took himself so lightly. When the hideous creeping paralysis, which was finally to make a living corpse of his poor frame, had robbed him of sight, he only said, "Je perds la vie, mais comme le rossignol, je n'en chanterai que mieux.'

Writing to congratulate Madame Jaubert on her daughter's convalescence, he says:

"13th April 1847.

"I have lived through a terrible winter, and am astonished at not having succumbed. It will be for another time.

give me of your daughter; she is "I am delighted at the news you young, and will be soon strong again. I shall come to see you ere long, being curious to see Madame de Grignan* in the character of reconvalescent. She must be much pulled down, and thinness lends her doubtless a new charm. Flesh after all but hides the

lines of beauty, which is not revealed in its whole ideal splendour till after illness has animated our form. As for me, I have thus adonisé jusqu'au squelettisme! The pretty women in the street turn back to stare at me when I pass. My closed eyes (only the eighth part of my right eye remains uncovered), my hollow cheeks, my delirious beard, my tottering gait, all give me a look of the last agony, which wonderfully suits my style. I have a real success at the present time as moribond. I devour hearts, only I cannot digest them. I am actually a very killing person, and you will see that the Marquise Christine Trivulzio will fall in love with me. I am quite the graveyard bone that she requires.

"Adieu, best and fairest! God keep you from embellishing after my fashion. To His safe and holy keeping I commend you. H. H."

The tender pity provoked at the sight of this cruel martyrdom, that

he bore with such heroic resignation, is told in many interesting pages, which space denies our dwelling on. Madame Jaubert gives us also many facts as to his taste in music, painting, and sculpture. She tells of the attraction that pale beauties, with regular features and a spectral sort of charm, had for him. She dwells on the extraordinary and fatal fascination that his last love his wife - exerted over him to the very end. A round, full-faced woman, with large black eyes, a smiling mouth filled with whitest teeth, and fully developed figure. Her voice in particular was a perpetual delight to Heine, his praises of it were constant; and he told Madame Jaubert that, during his long agony, that voice had recalled his spirit "at the very moment when decidedly it was taking flight towards the unknown futurity." Her magnetic power over him was, he said, irresistible. One night that he was shaken by a murderous spasm of so terrific a nature as to seem the sure prelude of death itself, his wife took his cold hand, chafed and warmed it, and he heard her say amidst her sobs, "No, Henri, no! you shall not die; you must have pity on me! My parrot died this morning, and if I were to lose you I should be too wretched." Heine's quaint comment was, "It was order, and I obeyed and kept alive, when such good reasons are given, you know."

an

The naïf form of speech of his unsophisticated wife was always a pleasure to him; and his tender protecting care of her was such, up to the last, as to render not only tolerable, but pleasant, the ignorance and inexperience that would otherwise have been insufferable. "She has never read a line of my writings," he merrily confided to

Madame Jaubert, "and does not even know what a poet is!"

Notwithstanding his desperate condition, he took upon himself all the many worrying cares of their household, the paying of bills, &c., leaving her free to mind her parrot and her flowers. He was most scrupulous in balancing the accounts of his expenditure; and we own to having been touched to the quick at Madame Jaubert's account of the blind and paralysed poet paying the maid the slight sum she required from a small bag that he would draw from under his pillow, fumbling at it till he had opened it, and taken thence the requisite amount. Madame Jaubert tells also of the generosity of his nature, and of the ingenious delicacy he would show in offering appropriate gifts and souvenirs to his friends on the authorised occasions of birthdays and fête days; but above all, and over and over again, does she tell of the fearful torture borne without any loss of self-possession. In the spring of 1848 some slight hopes had been raised by an improvement in his symptoms, due to a new doctor and his treatment: he had recovered the use of his hands and the power of taste. One eyelid had also reacquired the power of being slightly raised; but these anticipations of recovery were not of long duration.

He dictated the following letter on the 19th of September 1848 to Madame Jaubert, of which only the signature was in his hand :—

"LITTLE FAIRY (for by this name, of Madame Heine's bestowal, are you known in our home), -I have yet to thank you for your first amiable letter, written when starting for Les Roches not which. This morning I got your or for Madame de Grignan's, I know second letter, the affection and piety of which do me good, though the news it brings is hardly matter for rejoicing;

but to tell the truth, I am so stunned by physical pain that this ill news, of the failure at the Foreign Office, hardly touches me: it is as a pin-prick to a man stretched on the red-hot coals of

torture. . . . I write to-day to let you know that to-morrow you will no longer find me in my Villa Dolorosa at Passy, which I am leaving for Paris... Since I last had the comfort of seeing you, my ills have augmented, and certain alarming symptoms have decided my return to Paris. I do not wish to

be buried at Passy the graveyards there must be very dull. I want to get nearer to that of Montmartre, which I have long since chosen for my last abode.

"My cramps have been without intermission, they have invaded the whole spinal column, and reach up to the brain, where they may have effected greater damage than I am myself fit to ascertain. Religious thoughts come to the surface.

"Good-bye, Little Fairy. May God forgive you your enchantments, and take you under His holy and safe keeping. HENRI HEINE."

Madame Jaubert saw the poet for the last time four days before his

death. He was in full possession of all his powers of mind and conversation, and aware that his end was very near at hand. On her taking leave he kept his friend's

little hand for some time in his own, and murmured, "It will be prudent not to delay long if you wish to see me again." On the night of the 16th February 1856 he died. He had questioned his physician, and learnt that his deliverance was at hand; and death, that he met so calmly, and awaited so bravely, gave him no harsh treatment, but set a strange seal of beauty' on the worn, emaciated, and disfigured frame of the tortured poet, who lay transfigured on his deathbed in a return to youth and beauty.

And with his end, end also Madame Jaubert's "Souvenirs." They are a graceful monument to the friendship of these famous men, in whose intimacy her life had been lived, "whose bodies are buried in peace, but whose name liveth evermore."

WE were for the most part a queer lot out on that desolate southwest African coast, in charge of the various trading stations that were scattered along the coast, from the Gaboon river, past the mouth of the mighty Congo, to the Portuguese city of St. Paul de Loanda. A mixture of all sorts, especially of bad sorts broken-down clerks, men who could not succeed anywhere else, sailors, youths, and some whose characters would not have borne any investigation; and we very nearly all drank hard, and those who didn't drink hard, took more than was good for them.

I don't know exactly what induced me to go out there. I was young for one thing, the country was unknown, the berth was vacant, and the conditions of it easy.

Imagine a high rocky point or headland, stretching out sideways into the sea, and at its base a small river winding into a country that was seemingly a blank in regard to inhabitants or cultivation-a land continuing for miles and miles, as far as the eye could see, one expanse of long yellow grass, dotted here and there with groups of bastard palms. In front of the headland rolled the lonely South Atlantic; and, as if such conditions were not dispiriting enough to existence upon the Point, there was yet another feature which at times gave the place a still more ghastly look. A long way off the shore, the heaving surface of the ocean began, in anything like bad weather, to break upon the shoals of the coast. Viewed from the top of the rock, the sea at such times looked, for at least two miles out, as if it were scored over with

lines of white foam; but lower down, near the beach, each roller could be distinctly seen, and each roller had a curve of many feet, and was an enormous mass of water that hurled itself shorewards until it curled and broke.

When I first arrived on the Point there was, I may say, only one house upon it, and that belonged to Messrs. Flint Brothers of Liverpool. It was occupied by one solitary man named Jackson: he had had an assistant, but the assistant had died of fever, and I was sent to replace him. Jackson was a man of fifty at least, who had been a sailor before he had become an African trader. His face bore testimony to the winds and weather it had encountered, and wore habitually a grave if not melancholy expression. He was rough but kind to me, and though strict was just, which was no common feature in an old African hand to one who had just arrived on the coast.

He kept the factory-we called all houses on the coast factoriesas neat and clean as if it had been a ship. He had the floor of the portion we dwelt in holystoned every week; and numberless little racks and shelves were fitted up all over the house. The outside walls glittered with paint, and the yard was swept clean every morning; and every Sunday, at eight o'clock and sunset, the ensign was hoisted and lowered, and an old cannon fired at the word of command. Order and rule were with Jackson observed from habit, and were strictly enforced by him on all the natives employed in the factory.

Although I have said the coun