heads out of the window and beheld the overthrow of states and of their compendia, and the tones of the "Marseillaise" forced themselves into their ears despite their nightcaps. In fact, that in 1830 the tri-coloured flag fluttered for several days on the towers of Göttingen was a student's joke which universal history played on the eminently erudite Philistia of Georgia Augusta. In this all too serious age we have need of a few such cheerful incidents.[1]
So much for preface to an article which will busy itself with clearing up the past. The present is at this moment the most important, and the theme which it offers for discussion is of such a kind that further writing thereon especially depends on it.
I will give a fragment of the article which is here promised in an appendix. In another work the enlargement subsequently written may follow.[2]
- ↑ This remark is a curious instance of intuition or prophetic spirit. When Heine wrote it, the esprit gaulois had manifested no sign whatever of decadence, and in England merry Dickens had not even begun to publish. But, with his usual perception, Heine felt that the "all too serious age" was coming, when the world was to put away childish things, and "take its amusements sadly," even in novels, as it is now doing.
- ↑ This sentence, as well as the Appendix to Letter VI., is wanting in the French version.—Note by the German Editor.
