Among Heine's home-influences during his childhood that of his mother stands most prominent for good, and he never speaks of her but with reverence and affection. Of the character of his father very little is known. Harry, as the boy was originally named, was destined for a business career, as his parents were unable to send him to the university, and he was placed for this purpose in a banker's office in Frankfort. The situation was exceedingly distasteful to him, and he left it at the end of two weeks. Another attempt was made to establish him in the banking-business at Hamburg under the charge of a millionaire uncle, one of Hamburg's most worthy and respectable citizens, who plays an important part in the earlier part of Heine's career. Here he remained about two years, but with little better result than before. His Hamburg life seems to have been a failure in almost every sense. He got into trouble with certain of his uncle's relations, fell in love with one of his cousins, who shortly after married a more successful rival, and chafed under the dreary monotony which a business life offered to his susceptible temperament; until finally his uncle, seeing that he was in every way unfitted for his occupation, determined to send him to the University of Bonn, under the condition that he should fit himself for the legal profession. Thus Heine was pledged, as it were, from the first to his conversion—a fact all the more remarkable as Solomon Heine, the uncle, was a sturdy adherent of the Jewish faith himself.
The next five years were passed, with certain intervals, at the universities of Bonn, Göttingen and Berlin, and the elder Heine must have watched with some natural concern the career of his wilful protégé, who pursued anything but the course of study marked out for him, and turned his attention mainly to Oriental and mediæval literature, history, philology and other congenial pursuits, quite to the detriment of his professional studies. It was during the years of his university life that he appeared before the world as an author. His first volume of poems was published in 1821, soon followed by the two tragedies of Ratcliffe and Almanzor—deservedly the least popular of all his works—and the first volume of the Reisebilder. Never were the writings of an unknown author greeted with a speedier recognition, and he stepped at once into the full sunshine of his fame. Nevertheless, fame alone without its more substantial benefits could not free him from a pecuniary dependence on his uncle which was often as humiliating as it was indispensable. "Had the stupid boy learned anything," replied the latter once when congratulated upon his distinguished nephew, "he would not need to write books;" and these words betray an abundant source for those wearisome and ceaseless misunderstandings between uncle and nephew which only ceased with the former's death, and indicate perhaps one reason for the unhappy temper of the young author's genius.
There is but one theme in nearly all the early poems of Heine, and more particularly in those of the Lyrisches Intermezzo. The sorrows of an unhappy love are sung with a passion and a fervor such as one finds only in the higher forms of poetry. He adopted for his verse the old mediæval ballad-metre, preserving in a wonderful degree the limpid simplicity of the original, and infusing into it, as into all that comes from his pen, the modern sentiment and spirit. He calls upon all external Nature to share his sufferings, and invests every natural object with an intense personal interest which belongs only to that people whose egoism has outlived centuries of obliterating influences. The following songs, although they are very familiar ones, illustrate particularly well the characteristics just mentioned. I give them in the original, as they suffer unusually by translation:
Und wüssten's die Blumen die kleinen, Wie tief verwundet mein Herz, Sie würden mit mir weinen, Zu heilen meinen Schmerz.
Und wüssten's die Nachtigallen, Wie ich so traurig und krank, Sie hiessen fröhlich erschallen Erquickenden Gesang.
Und wüssten sie meine Wehe, Die goldenen Sternelein, Sie kämen aus ihrer Höhe, Und sprächen Trost mir ein.
Die alle können's nicht wissen, Nur eine kennt mein Schmerz: Sie hat ja selbst zerrissen, Zerrissen mir das Herz.
Or—
Warum sind denn die Rosen so blass, O sprich, mein Lieb, warum? Warum sind denn im grünen Gras Die blauen Veilchen so stumm?