And think my heart is buried here!

17. It is this song of love for one's kind which makes Burns, Heine, and Goethe pre-eminently the singers of the human heart when it finds itself linked to one other heart. And it is this strain which gives everlasting life to the following breath of Pushkin's muse: TO A FLOWER.

A floweret, withered, odorless,

In a book forgot I find;

And already strange reflection

Cometh into my mind.

Bloomed where? When? In what spring?

And how long ago? And plucked by whom?

Was it by a strange hand, was it by a dear hand?

And wherefore left thus here?

Was it in memory of a tender meeting?

Was it in memory of a fated parting?

Was it in memory of a lonely walk

In the peaceful fields, or in the shady woods?

Lives he still? lives she still?

And where is their nook this very day?

Or are they too withered,

Like unto this unknown floweret?

18. But from the love of the individual the growing soul comes in time to the love of the race; or rather, we only love an individual because he is to us the incorporation of some ideal. And let the virtue for which we love him once be gone, he may indeed keep our good will, but our love for him is clean gone out. This is because the soul in its ever-upward, heavenward flight alights with its love upon individuals solely in the hope of finding here its ideal, its heaven realized. But it is not given unto one person to fill the whole of a heaven-searching soul. Only the ideal, God alone, can wholly fill it. Hence the next strain to that of love for the individual is this longing for the ideal, a longing for what is so vague to most of us, a longing to which therefore not wholly inappropriately the name has been given of a longing for the Infinite.

19. And of this longing, Heine has given in eight lines immeasurably pathetic expression: "Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam Im Norden auf kahler Hoh'.

Ihn schlafert; mit weisser Decke

Umhullen ihn Eis und Schnee.

Er traumt von einer Palme,

Die, fern im Morgenland,

Einsam und schweigend trauert

Auf brennender Felsenwand."

Heine has taken the evergreen pine in the cold clime, as the emblem of this longing, and a most noble emblem it is. But I cannot help feeling that in choosing a fallen angel, as Pushkin has on the same subject, he was enabled to give it a zenith-like loftiness and a nadir-like depth not to be found in Heine.

THE ANGEL.

At the gates of Eden a tender Angel

With drooping head was shining;

A demon gloomy and rebellious

Over the abyss of hell was flying.

The spirit of Denial, the spirit of Doubt,

The spirit of purity espied;

And unwittingly the warmth of tenderness

He for the first time learned to know.