Helen, after such various and hazardous adventures, found herself once more in her native city, New York. Many solicitous and finally tender letters passed between the captain and Miss Gerard, but when the formal proposal of marriage was made she placed the missive in her father's hands.
"Daughter, is your heart in this?" he asked.
"Yes," was her modest reply; and the next steamer carried a joint letter from father and daughter extending a cordial invitation to Captain McDowell to make them a visit. In the following autumn one of October's fairest days saw Helen the bride of the officer in blue coat and brass buttons.
Somewhat more than twenty years have elapsed since Heine's death. Had he lived to the present time he would have been little past the age of eighty, and there are many of his contemporaries and associates who are still alive. Though an exceptionally isolated figure in the world of letters, he serves to connect us in a great measure with the heroic age of German literature; and not in point of time only, but by the nature of his work, which exhibits certain elements of the Goethe-and-Schiller period, combined with others of the school of "Young Germany," so called. This, at least, is the position always assigned him; and the following pages may not be uninteresting in showing to some extent, and by means of a few of the more striking points of his character and genius, how far he really occupies this place in literature.
How came Heinrich Heine to be a product of German soil at all? is the first question which naturally arises in regard to him--that "son of the Revolution," as he somewhere styles himself, who made France his adopted country for nearly half his life; with his ardent sympathy for French ideas; with his wonderful wit, which laid presumptuous claim to the mantle of Voltaire and Aristophanes; with such rapid and facile powers of expression for his thought as makes even Lowell, who greatly amuses himself at the expense of German composition in general, admit that "Heine can be airily light in German;" with his intense belief in the progressive spirit of his own time, and his intense hatred of its accompanying advance of utilitarianism and philistinism? Even the poet's laurel, the closest tie that bound him to his own people, he would have been willing to lay aside. "I do not know," he writes, "if I fairly deserve to have my grave adorned with the poet's laurel. Poetry, however much I loved her, was always but a sacred plaything to me, or a consecrated means to divine ends. I have never laid much stress on the poet's fame, and care little if my songs get praise or blame. But ye may lay a sword upon my coffin, for I was a brave soldier in the War of Liberation for humanity." And yet, in spite of it all, by his culture, by his sentiment and by his real sympathies, Heine belonged to the land of his birth rather than to the land of his adoption.