Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/27



Mathilde Blind, whose patronymic was Cohen, was born at Mannheim on March 21, 1841. Her father, a retired banker of independent means, elderly and widowed, was positive and practical: her mother, young and lively, combined sweetness and depth with great cheerfulness and liveliness of character, and possessed the beauty which, equally with many of her mental characteristics, became her daughter's heritage. The dissimilarity between her parents both in age and temperament undoubtedly left deep traces on her mental constitution. After the death of her father, her mother married Dr. Karl Blind, and, some years later, Mathilde, as well as a younger brother, Ferdinand, assumed the name of their step-father.

Mathilde's birth had taken place at a period of profound external peace, but amid a society pervaded by deep and just political discontent, the more dangerous from the arbitrary suppression of every external manifestation. She wanted just a month of seven years when the long-smothered mass of slowly accumulating anger and disgust caught fire from the explosion of the French Revolution of February, 1848. All Germany was speedily in a blaze, and nowhere did a fiercer agitation prevail than in the Grand Duchy of Baden, to which Mathilde Blind belonged by birth. Here the movement assumed a republican complexion, unhke the more general feeling 2