Heinrich Heine, a German poet and critic, of Jewish parentage, born in Dusseldorf, Dec. 12, 1799, or as Steinmann asserts in 1797, died in Paris, Feb. 17, 1850. His first poem was written on Napoleon's visit to Dusseldorf (Nov. 2, 1810). At the lyceum of Dusseldorf he made great progress in the regular studies, mastering also English, French, and Italian. In 1815 he was sent to Frankfort to qualify himself for mercantile life, but showed such repugnance to it that in 1819 he was sent to Bonn to study law, but studied everything except law. In September, 1820, he went to Gottingen, which he learned to dislike and satirized bitterly in after years. He next removed to Berlin, where his character and feelings rapidly assumed that satirical indifferency and reckless audacity now identified with his name. While in Berlin he earnestly studied philosophy under Hegel, and became intimate with Chamisso, Fouque, Bopp, and Grabbe. Here in 1822 appeared his Gedichte, subsequently published as "Youthful Sorrows" in his "Book of Songs." Though favorably received by eminent critics, they attracted at the time but little attention. A single sorrow, the early disappointment of Heine in his love for his cousin Evelina van Geldern, runs through all these poems.

He also published at this period his plays Almansor and Badcliff, with the Lyrisches Intermezzo. In the summer of 1822 he made a journey to Poland. He returned to Gottingen in 1823, was made doctor of law in 1825, and in the same vear went to Heiligenstadt, where on June 28 he is said to have been baptized into the Lutheran church. Heine had taken his legal degree because his uncle, the eminent Hamburg banker and philanthropist Salomon Heine, had made it a condition of giving him his education. He however continued to aid him in his chosen literary career. He now went to Hamburg, where in 1820 he published the Harzreise, the first part of his Reisebilder. Very few hooks ever excited in Germany such an extraordinary sensation. In 1827 he went to Munich to edit with Dr. Lindner the Politische Annalen. In 1829 he returned to Berlin, and here occurred the famous quarrel with the poet Platen, who, having satirized Heine, received in return the most bitter sarcasm and withering abuse. Literature hardly affords any parallel to this cynical retort. In 1831 Heine went to Paris, having become so obnoxious to the Prussian government as a liberal writer that he had to choose between exile and imprisonment.

From this time till 1848 his influence in Germany was very great, and he acquired in France the reputation of being the wittiest French writer since Voltaire. In 1831 he wrote a series of articles on the state of France for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, which were collected and published both in French and German. In 1833 appeared his Beitrage zur Geschichte der neu-ern schonen Literatur in Deutschland (2 vols., Hamburg), and V Allemagne, a characteristic and daring work, in which he attacked with relentless severity the romantic writers, the philosophers, and in fact nearly everybody. This book created a storm of fury in Germany, where democrats, pietists, Teutomaniacs, and state officials united in denouncing it; while in France no other work has done so much to stop the current of romanticism. In 1840 he published a violent work on his former friend Borne, then dead. This involved him in a duel with the husband of a lady who was stigmatized in the book as having entertained illicit relations with Borne. In 1843 he paid his last visit to Germany to see his mother.

His public bitterness and literary cruelties were in strange contrast with his personal good qualities, He was generous, even self-sacrificing, especially to poor literary men, and during the cholera risked his life by remaining to nurse a sick cousin. In 1847 he was attacked by a painful spinal complaint, which tormented him almost without cessation until his death. By his own request all religious rites were omitted at his funeral. The bold infidelity, the reckless licentiousness, and the unqualified faith in the world and the flesh, which characterized Heine's life as well as his writings, were counterbalanced by such sincere belief in his own doctrines, such sympathy for suffering, and such acute perception of the beautiful in every form, that it is difficult for those unfamiliar with the social developments of modern continental European life and literature to appreciate his true nature or position. He received from the French government an annual pension of 4,000 francs from 1830 to 1848, but did not criticise it the less severely in his writings. In his later years Heine returned from unbounded skepticism, if not to an evangelical faith, at least to theism, the Bible being constantly read by him, and appearing to him, as he said, like a suddenly discovered treasure.

As he still retained his love of paradox and of mystification, the real degree of his conversion became the subject of no little controversy and comment. In the latter part of his life Heine married "Mathilde," of whom he often speaks tenderly in his writings. His works, in addition to those mentioned, are : Franzosische Zustande (Hamburg, 1833); Der Salon (1834-'40); Shak-speare's Madchen und Frauen (Leipsic, 1839); Neue Gedichte(Hamburg, 1844); Ballade uber die Schlacht von Hastings and Atta Troll (1847); Rom an zero (1851); Doctor Faust, ein, Tanzpoem (1851); Vennischte Schriften (1854); and Les aveux d'unpoete de la noarelle Allemagne, in the Revue des Deux Mondes (1854). A collection of his works was published in German at Philadelphia in 1856 (6 vols. 8vo; new ed., 7 vols. 12mo, 18G5), and a complete edition at Hamburg in 1861-7 (21 vols. 8vo). There is also a French version executed by Heine himself, under the revision of Gerard de Nerval and others, and several translations of special poems have appeared.

The following works on Heine have appeared since his death : Hein-rich Heine, Erinnerungen, by Alfred Meissner (Hamburg, 1850); II. Heine's Wirken und Stre-oen, by Strodtmann (1857); II. Heine's Denk-wardigkeiten aus meinem Leben mil ihm, by Steinmann (1857); Ueber H. Heine, by Schmidt-Weissenfels(1857); H.Heine's Leben und Werke, by Strodtmann (1867-'8); Heinrich Heine und seine Zeit, by his niece, Helene Hirsch (published simultaneously in German and French, 1873); and "Life and Opinions of Heine," by "William Stigant (2 vols., 1873). English versions of Heine's works are: the "Pictures of Travel," translated by Charles G. Leland (Philadelphia, 1856); the "Book of Songs," by J. E. Wallis (London, 1850), and by C. G. Leland (Philadelphia, 1864); the "Poems of Heine, complete, translated in the Original Metres," by Edgar Alfred Bowring (London, 1859); and "Scintillations from the Prose Works of Heinrich Heine," translated by S. A. Stern (New York, 1873).