Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 06.djvu/15

 those of any dame of the Celestial realm, and in whose giggling, tittering heart the craziest caprices made their nests. For it was her chief delight to tear to rags the costliest silks and cloths of gold. When they r-r-ripped and cracked sharply between her destroying fingers, she shouted for joy. But at last, when she had spent all her fortune on such a fancy, and had torn up all her properties and possessions, she was, by advice and opinion of all her mandarins, declared to be an incurable lunatic, and was confined in a round tower.

This Chinese princess or caprice personified is like the personified Muse of German poet, who cannot be passed without mention in a history of Romantic poetry. This is the Muse who smiles at us so madly from the poems of Clemens Brentano. There she sits, tearing the most lustrous satin trains and the most brilliant gold lace, and her wild and merrily laughing madness fills our souls with uncanny rapture and voluptuous pain. But now for fifteen years Brentano has lived secluded from the world, or walled up in his Catholicism; for now there remains to him nothing more that is precious to tear up. For he has torn, as it was said, the hearts which loved him, and everyone who was his friend has some capricious injury, by him inflicted, to complain of; but it was most and worst of all on himself, and on his own poetic power, that he practised his mania for destruction