The Candidate (with an expression in his eyes as if he would send the Landed Proprietor head-over-heels to Oestanvik)—­I don’t know whether Miss Louise likes flattery.

Landed Proprietor (who takes no notice of his rival)—­Cousin Louise, are you fond of blue?

Louise—­Blue?  It is a pretty color; but I almost like green better.

Landed Proprietor—­Well, that’s very droll; it suits exceedingly well.  At Oestanvik my drawing-room furniture is blue; beautiful light-blue satin.  But in my bedroom I have green moreen.  Cousin Louise, I believe really—­

The Candidate coughs as though he were going to be suffocated, and rushes out of the room.  Louise looks after him and sighs, and afterwards sees in the cards so many misfortunes for Cousin Thure that he is quite frightened.  “The peas frosted!”—­“conflagration in the drawing-room”—­and at last “a basket” ["the mitten"].  The Landed Proprietor declares still laughingly that he will not receive “a basket.”  The sisters smile and make their remarks.

CLEMENS BRENTANO

(1778-1842)

The intellectual upheaval in Germany at the beginning of this century brought a host of remarkable characters upon the literary stage, and none more gifted, more whimsical, more winning than Clemens Brentano, the erratic son of a brilliant family.  Born September 8th, 1778, at Ehrenbreitstein, Brentano spent his youth among the stimulating influences which accompanied the renaissance of German culture.  His grandmother, Sophie de la Roche, had been the close friend of Wieland, and his mother the youthful companion of Goethe.  Clemens, after a vain attempt to follow in the mercantile footsteps of his father, went to Jena, where he met the Schlegels; and here his brilliant but unsteady literary career began.

In 1803 he married the talented Sophie Mareau, but three years later his happiness was terminated by her death.  His next matrimonial venture was, however, a failure:  an elopement in 1808 with the daughter of a Frankfort banker was quickly followed by a divorce, and he thereafter led the uncontrolled life of an errant poet.  Among his early writings, published under the pseudonym of ‘Marie,’ were several satires and dramas and a novel entitled ‘Godwi,’ which he himself called “a romance gone mad.”  The meeting with Achim von Arnim, who subsequently married his sister Bettina, decided his fate:  he embarked in literature once and for all in close association with Von Arnim.  Together they compiled a collection of several hundred folk-songs of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, under the name of ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ (The Boy’s Wonderhorn), 1806-1808.  That so musical a people as the Germans should be masters of lyric poetry is but natural,—­every longing, every impression, every impulse gushes into song; and in ’Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ we hear the tuneful voices of a naive race, singing what they have seen or dreamed or felt during three hundred years.  The work is dedicated to Goethe, who wrote an almost enthusiastic review of it for the Literary Gazette of Jena.  “Every lover or master of musical art,” he says, “should have this volume upon his piano.”