The opening of Preface
It may perhaps be thought that I exhibit something of the brazen-facedness of a hardened offender in venturing once more (but, I hope, for the last time) to present myself to the public in the guise of a translator,--and, what is more, a translator of a great poet. The favourable reception, however, that my previous translations of the Poems of Schiller and Goethe have met with at the hands of the public, may possibly be admitted as some excuse for this new attempt to make that public acquainted with the works of a third great German minstrel. Comparatively little known and little appreciated in England, the name of Heine is in Germany familiar as a household word; and while, on the one hand, many of his charming minor poems have become dear to the hearts of thousands and tens of thousands of his fellow-countrymen, and are sung alike in the palace and the cottage, in the country and the town, on the other his sterner works have done much to influence the political and religious tendencies of the modern German school.