The ten years succeeding the publication of Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1835) coincided in point of time with the awakening in England, through Thomas Carlyle, and in America as well, of an intense if not yet profound interest in German Literature.  It must remain a tribute to the ideal enthusiasm of the movement that, among the first German works to receive a permanent welcome and become domiciled in American literary circles, was that strange and glittering mass, flotsam of a great poet’s life dislodged and jettisoned from his personality by the subtle arts of the “Child” who had now gathered it up again and was presenting it to the astonished world.  At a time when the Foreign Quarterly Review in England (1838) was vainly endeavoring to persuade “Madame von Arnim” not to undertake the translation of her work, “whose unrestrained effusions far exceed the-bounds authorized by English decorum,” Margaret Fuller was preparing in Boston to translate Bettina’s Guenderode, and soon felt herself in a position to state[3] that “Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child is as popular here as in Germany.”  In one respect, indeed, Bettina’s vogue in America remained for the rest of her lifetime more secure than in her own country, where the publication of her later politico-sociological works, Dies Buch gehoert dem Koenig (1843) and Gespraeche mit Daemonen (1852), was followed by a temporary eclipse of her popularity, and where also her fate, in persistently associating her with Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen, as a foil for Rahel’s brilliant but transitory glitter, had tarnished her own fame.[4]

[Illustration:  BETTINA VON ARNIM]

For these things American readers of the Correspondence seem to have cared but little.  While German critics were deliberating as to what grouping of characteristics could best express Bettina as a type, the American public had already discovered in her a rare personality—­the recipient and custodian of Frau Rat’s fondest memories of Goethe’s childhood; the “mythological nurse-maid,"[5] to whom, though in her proper name as well as to her first-born son, successive editions of Grimm’s Fairy Tales had been dedicated; the youthful friend of Beethoven, from whom she had received treasured confidences as to the influence exerted by Goethe’s verse upon his mind and art; at times the haunting Muse of Germany’s greatest poet and, since 1811, the wife of the most chivalrous of German poets, Achim von Arnim.  If we add to these characteristics the circumstance that, as Arnim’s wife and as the mother of their rarely endowed children, she had become the centre of a distinguished and devoted circle in the Mark Brandenburg and in the Prussian capital, the distance separating us from Ben Jonson’s attitude in his Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke is no longer very great:  “Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother."[6]