But Winckelmann, if he did not find the visionary Rome, soon became reconciled to the real one. The city put on the homelike look for him, and it was not long before it became profoundly endeared to him. It was with the authentic pang of homesickness that he left it, finally, to make that northward journey from which he was never to return.
How different was Heine's first experience of his newly-found home, Paris! For that other migrating spirit there was no such initiatory disappointment. For Heine his adopted city was from the first a spiritual home, a true city of refuge, an island of the blessed. For years, lingering in his cold city of the north, _verdammtes Hamburg_, as he called it, he had longed in vain to escape; and to what vivid expressions of his suffering he gives utterance! In one place he compares himself to the white swans at the public garden, whose wings were broken on the approach of winter that they should not fly away to the south:
"The waiter at the Pavilion declared that they were comfortable there, and that the cold was healthy for them. But that is not true. It is not good for one to be imprisoned hopelessly in a cold pool, and there to be frozen up; to have one's wings broken so that one can no longer fly forth to the fair South, where the beautiful flowers are, and the golden sunlight, and the blue mountain lakes. Alas! to me once was Fate not much kinder."
While still pent up in Hamburg he had written thus to a friend: "I am no German, as you well know.... There are but three civilized people--the French, the Chinese, and the Persian.... Ah, how I yearn for Ispahan! Alas! I, poor fellow, am far from its lovely minarets and odoriferous gardens! Ah, it is a terrible fate for a Persian poet that he must wear himself out in your base, rugged German tongue.... O Firdusi! O Ischami! O Saadi! how miserable is your brother!"
As Goethe is said to have thought of doing when he was in love with "Lili," Heine at this time thought of retiring to the United States, "a land which I loved before I knew it," as he wrote from Heligoland in 1830. How he knew it does not appear, but he decided against us; he calls this country a "frightful dungeon of freedom, where the invisible chains gall still more painfully than the visible ones at home, and where ... the mob exercises its coarse dominion!" Meanwhile, as he tells us somewhere, "In Hamburg it was my only consolation to think that I was better than other people."