Page:Masterpieces of German literature volume 18.djvu/405

 Rh the arts and sciences. There, she studied history and literature, and received the degree of doctor of philosophy.

In Zurich she stayed for nearly ten years. After having taken her degree, she accepted, first, the position of a secretary at the public library, and then that of a high school teacher in Zurich. In 1896 she left that "town of hope and youth," as she has called it, and went to Bremen where, for a while, she taught in a Latin school for girls. In Vienna, where she afterward lived for a time, she married a dentist, Dr. Ceconi, whom she followed to Trieste and later to Munich. In 1906 she obtained a divorce from him. Soon afterward she married again, and with her second husband, a cousin of hers, who is a lawyer in Brunswick, she is living in her native town.

We have but scant information about the details of her outer life. The chief interest, therefore, will rest in her spiritual biography. And her inner history has, indeed, a special interest due to the rather abrupt change which at the beginning of her career came into her relations with the world around her. It must have been like a revolution to her when she left her North German home and went to the Swiss university town. She came of old patrician stock, one for whom life was made easy and never became "a mere drought and famine." Although imbibing readily the refinement and culture of her family traditions, from the beginning her mind was working against the limitations which she found in the life about her. Her instinct for self-development at last made her break traditional bounds, and free herself to become a woman after her own mind.

Ricarda Huch, who never takes her readers into her confidence, has not told us sufficiently what the new phase of her life in Zurich meant to her. Where even the landscape was new to her, everything must have attracted the young woman. She took part in the real student life, and met people who were congenial to her. And when she tried to grasp all her manifold impressions, and to give them adequate expression, she found herself a poet.