Excerpt from Travel-Pictures: Including the Tour in the Harz, Norderney, and Book of Ideas, Together With the Romantic School Readers some specimens of Heine's prose, I should like to state briefly the considerations that have guided me in my selection. It has long surprised me that in Spite of Heine's growing popularity in England - wit ness the biographies, monographs, magazine articles, and various versions of his lyrics that have. Lately appeared no Englishman' has hitherto undertaken a complete ver sion of the best known and most brilliant of Heine's prose writings. I therefore proposed to myself to translate the whole of the Reisebilder but as I proceeded with the work, I discovered that I had set myself an impossible task. Even in the first three books there occur passages which I felt some hesitation in admitting, but let pass as at worst faults of taste, and essential for a just appreciation of Heine's genius. With the fourth book of the Raise bilder, Italien, the case was different. Here, most of all, there is need of George Eliot's friendly penknife to exercise a strict censorship, and, owing doubtless to my want of surgical skill, I found that when I had excised from the Baths of Lucca all that was offensive to English taste and decency, what remained was little better. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.