Page:Works of Heinrich Heine 07.djvu/42

22 Oh, I know them, these Jesuits of the North! He who has ever, be it from dire need or heedlessly, accepted the least thing from them is thereby lost for ever. Even as hell kept Proserpine because she had eaten there the seed of a pomegranate, so those Jesuits never give liberty again to any one who has in the least profited by them, and be it only a single seed of the golden apple, or, to speak more prosaically, a single louis-d'or, they hardly allow him, like hell to Proserpine, to pass half the year in the light of the upper world. At such times they indeed appear as the children of light, and take their places among us, the other Olympians, and speak and write with ambrosian liberality; but when the appointed time comes, they are found again in infernal darkness, in the realm of obscurity, and they write Prussian apologies, declarations against the Messager, rules for the censorship, or even a defence of the resolutions of the Diet.

I cannot pass by these resolutions of the Diet without comment, yet neither to refute them, much less, as has been often done, to seek to demonstrate their illegality. As I very well know who the persons were who prepared the document on which those resolutions were founded,