poems, in the metre of “Hiawatha”; I had for a while a notion of studying Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and decided that I would learn the language later.  By this time I must have begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at least, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson; but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry.  I suspect that I carried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraid that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I was ready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation.  This is the worst of the ardent lover of literature:  he wishes to make every one else share his rapture, will he, nill he.  Many good fellows suffered from my admiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids.  I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I am afraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in the case of the poems I did worse, I repeated them.  This seems rather incredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at least attests my sincerity.  It was long before I cured myself of so pestilent a habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safely trusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener.  I dare say I could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me; I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he was to mine.  My head was full of him; his words were always behind my lips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some one else, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could.  It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for the future in which I must make my own place in the world.  Work, and hard work, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by no means the whole story.  You may get on without much of it, or you may do a great deal, and not get on.  I was willing to do as much of it as I could get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had many forebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to the substance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget.  I was already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthy model for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did.  None of the authors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could not have believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me.  In fact, as I have expressed, none ever has been.

XXIV.  HEINE