Excerpt from Die Harzreise Heinrich heine was born Dec. 13, 1799, at Dussel dorf on the Rhine. His ancestors on both sides were Jewish. While his father, Samson Heine, was a man of easy-going, dreamy, aesthetic temperament, it is noteworthy that his mother, who had ideas of her own and directed her son's education, looked upon poetry and romance with contempt, and did everything in her power to sti?e any promptings of his imaginative nature. Heine refers in the Harzreise to the Dusseldorf Lycée (established in an old Franciscan convent by the then ruling Napoleonic government), where he passed several years and wrestled with the Latin irregular verbs. This Lycée was under the management of Rector Schall meyer, a liberal-minded Catholic priest, who took great interest in young Heine and wished to have him fitted for the priesthood. In those days French troops were quartered on the town, and Heine has told how his boyish passion for the great Napoleon was fanned by the old French drummer, Le Grand, and how one day he saw with tremulous emotion the wondrous Em peror himself riding through the streets of Dusseldorf.