Page:A cyclopaedia of female biography.djvu/771

 , withdrew himself from society, and for two months the place of his retreat was unknown. Thus two noble-hearted women, true and disinterested in their affection for him, were sacrificed to his selfish vanity and worldly wisdom.

VARANO DI COSTANZA, at Camerino, 1428. She had a learned and literary education. Her family having lost the signoiy of Camerino, she made a Latin harangue to Bianca Visconti, in order to obtain its restitution. Having failed in her eloquence, she wrote to the principal sovereigns of Italy to procure assistance, and this time her efforts resulted successfully. At the restoration of her father 

VARNHAGEN, RACHEL LEVIN, ROBERT, born at Berlin, in 1771. She was a Jewess by birth; and with no outward advantages to compensate for this grand mischance, she nevertheless raised herself by degrees—and without seeking it, but by sheer instinctive elasticity—to be a queen of thought and taste in the most intellectual country of Europe. Her early education seems to have been much neglected; but, with the strength and compass of soul with which she was gifted, this absence of external influence only caused the internal might to develop itself with more freshness and originality.

In the year 1815, after a long-continued struggle with herself, she felt constrained to make an open profession of Christianity; in the same year, she married K. A. Vamhagen von Ense, and their union was a pre-eminently happy one, although she was several years older than her husband. Her husband published her letters and biography after her death. As an authoress, she is only known through her letters, every one of which breathes a spirit of purity, devotion, and Christian humility, that makes them worthy of a place in every Christian library. She was acquainted and corresponded with most of the distinguished persons in Germany. Schleienmacher, Frederick Shlegel, Prince Louis Ferdinand of Prussia, and Gentz, the famous historian, all knew and acknowledged the Berlin Jewess, as Pope Paul the Fifth did Cardinal Pen-on:—"May God inspire that man with good thoughts, for whatsoever he says, we must do it!" She was noted for her great strength, vigour, and activity of mind; for her ardent love of truth, and her strong, resolute, and vehement contempt for falsehood or shams of all kinds; and also for the truly womanly grace and kindliness which marked all her actions. Amid the horrors of war in Berlin in 1813, and the greater horrors of pestilence in 1831, she moved about like a magnificent Valkyrie, and exclaimed triumphantly, "My whole day is a feast of doing good!" She died in 1833, at Berlin.

VASHTI, beautiful wife of Ahasuerus, (or Artaxerxes,) King of Persia, gained her celebrity by disobeying her husband. Ahasuerus,