into a mischievous elf, and, if we reach out to grasp the kobold, lo! a sibyl stands before us!” Behind all Bettina’s mobility there is a force of individuality, as irresistible and as recurrent as the tides.  Her brother Clemens and her brother-in-law Savigny tried in vain to temper the violence of her enthusiasm for the insurgent Tyrolese, of her flaming patriotism, of her hatred of philistinism in every form, of her scorn for the then fashionable neutrality and moderation in the expression of political opinion.

[Illustration:  THE GOETHE MONUMENT (BY BETTINA NON ARNIM)]

She was by nature and choice the advocate of the oppressed, whenever and wherever met with.  The aristocratic elegant Rumohr was obliged to put up with the following from her:  “Why are you not willing to exchange your boredom, your melancholy caprices, for a rifle?  With your figure, slender as a birch, you could leap over abysses and spring from rock to rock; but you are lazy and infected with the disease of neutrality.  You cannot hear the voices saying:  ’Where is the enemy?  On, on, for God, the Kaiser, and the Fatherland!’” Even Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, who is, according to Bettina, merely a supine hero, fails to elude her electric grasp:  “Come, flee with me across the Alps to the Tyrolese.  There will we whet our swords and forget thy rabble of comedians; and as for all thy darling mistresses, they must lack thee awhile.”

The end of poets’ friendships with literary women is not always marked by an anticlimax.  Of Margaret Fuller, Emerson wrote in the privacy of his Journal:  “I have no friend whom I more wish to be immortal than she.  An influence I cannot spare, but would always have at hand for recourse.”  Words like these Bettina was continually listening for from her poet-idol, but she heard instead only the disillusioning echo of her own enthusiasms.  Possessing neither stability of mind nor any consistent roundness of character, she was incapable of rendering herself necessary to Goethe.  In her case, however, the gifts that were denied at her cradle seem to have been more than made up to her.  Her ardent and aspiring soul, shutting out “all thoughts, all passions, all delights” else, was distilled into longing to share in the unending life of Goethe’s poesy.[10]

Through the possession of this quality, Bettina, though not herself of heroic mold, enters the society of the great heroines and speaks to posterity.  Ariadne on the island of Naxos lives not more truly in Ovid’s poetical Epistles, than Bettina in the Correspondence.  But Bettina has not, like Ariadne, had immortality conferred upon her through the verses of two great poets.  She has rather taken it for herself, as Goethe said she was wont to do, in anticipating every gift.  It is accordingly not in the Elegiacs of Ovid, flowing as a counter-stream to Lethe, that we may discern Bettina’s gesture of immortal repose as a metamorphosed heroine.  She is a type of the inspired lyrical nature, a belated child of the Renaissance.  A graceful English song-writer of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Campion, who was as fond as Bettina of the figure of the flower and the sun, through which she symbolized her relation to Goethe, has in his verses anticipated her pose and her tone of agitated expectancy: