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The late Heinrich Heine, 1856. German poet. 'Although for eight years he has been reported in a dying condition, his activity has never ceased...Even his lengthened illness had given a new impulse to his fancy and he who had laughed without scruple at everything which was deemed serious in hie fellow-men found also an inexhaustible source of mirth in his own dilapidated state...It was not that he blinded himself to the horrors of his situation; shut up as he was on the second story of a house in Paris, ultimately deprived of the sight of one eye, and scarcely having the use of the other, and finding in opium alone a solace to his pain, he actually loved to intensify the consciousness of his own agonies, mental and bodily, by minutely describing them; and then came the strange inward laugh, so often expressed before in mocking verse and epigrammatic prose'. From "Illustrated London News", 1856.