Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/119

Rh accurately, one should adopt the style of a Manual of Advanced Mechanism, very much as if writing of a vast complicated manufactory, of a roaring, whizzing, choking, pounding, and wearisomely humming and buzzing machine existence, where the brightly polished wheels of utility turn around old and rusty historical dates. The Saint-Simonians declare with right that England is the hand and France the heart of the world. Ah! this grand heart of the world would lose all its noble blood if, counting on English generosity, it should some day beg help from this dry and frozen hand. I do not imagine egoistic England as an enormously fat, prosperous, beer-belly, as caricaturists depict it, but, as a satirist describes, in the form of a tall, lean, bony old bachelor sewing a torn-off button on his breeches, and that with a thread the end knot of which is the globe; and then, cutting off the thread where he no longer needs it, he calmly lets the world fall into the abyss.

The French think that the English people cherish a desire for freedom like their own, and that it is striving like them against the usurpations of an aristocracy, and that this gives and