Heinrich, a distinguished German poet and miscellaneous writer, was born at Dusseldorf, Dec. 13, 1799. His father was a Jewish merchant in that city, in circumstances so humble that without the aid of a wealthy brother in Hamburg he would not have been able to educate the future poet. On leaving school in 1819 the young Heine became a student of law at Bonn, where he wrote the now forgotten tragedies of Almansa and Ratcliff, and some short miscellaneous pieces. In the following year he removed to Göttingen, which in a little while he exchanged for Berlin, where he mixed with the fashionable literary circles. In 1823 he returned to Göttingen, and in due time he graduated there as doctor of law. He first attracted notice as an author by his Reisebilder (Pictures of Travel), begun in 1826 and finished in 1829. His Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), extended his reputation; and when the expulsion of the old Bourbons from France in 1830 seemed to point to Paris as the future centre of political action and liberty in continental Europe, Heine established himself in that city, and remained there till his death, Feb. 18, 1856. It was in Paris that he wrote his Salon, and Romantische Schule, two collections of poems entitled respectively Neue Gedichte und Romanzen, and sein Vermischte Schriften (Miscellaneous Works), published in 1854. During the ministry of Guizot he enjoyed a pension of 4000 francs from the French government.

Since the days of Voltaire there has been no such scoller as Heine; and were it credible that his cynicism was wholly genuine, Voltaire might in comparison with him be almost called an orthodox Christian. Nothing that men have ever considered sacred or estimable has escaped his sneer. Christianity of course he mocked at; and when in his latter years he professed himself a convert to it, it was discovered from his own Confessions that he had not embraced Christianity, but had merely ceased openly to countenance atheism, because it had grown vulgar. He alternately mocked and praised every generous and noble sentiment; and he found an endless subject of scolding in the diseases that confined him almost entirely to his bed during the last eight years of his life. The very agonies of mental and physical torment that he underwent he seemed to delight in intensifying by describing them in their minutest details, and then laughing at them and his own descriptions of them. His poetry repays perusal better than his prose, which is often flippant, epigrammatic, and merely smart; but his poetry is in a style peculiarly his own. "Other bards," says a recent critic, "have passed from grave to gay within the compass of one work; but the art of constantly showing two natures within the small limit of perhaps three ballad-verses was reserved for Heine. No one like him understands how to build up a little edifice of the tenderest and most refined sentiment for the mere pleasure of knocking it down with a last line. No man like him approaches his reader with a doleful countenance, and pours in the ear a tale of secret sorrow, and when the sympathies are enlisted, surprises his confidant with a horse-laugh." He ridiculed with merciless sarcasm the very democracy of which he had been at one time the apostle and the martyr.