Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/28

2 of Germans that new life might yet be infused into the old forms, Mr. Karl Blind, who, although a young man, was already well known as an ardent republican, and the subject of prosecutions for offences of the press, ending in acquittals, threw himself with ardour into the revolutionary movement. After a year of revolutionary events, during which Karl Blind was arrested on the failure of a popular rising of which he was a leader, and confined as a prisoner of war for eight months, but rescued by the people, a republican government was established in 1849, and Mr. Blind was despatched to represent it in Paris. By this time, however, the reaction had triumphed in Vienna and Berlin, and the Prince of Prussia, afterwards the Emperor William the First, entering the Grand Duchy at the head of a Prussian army, put down the revolution after a gallant resistance. Karl Blind took refuge in Belgium, which, after three years, he was compelled to quit in consequence of pressure applied to the Belgian Government by the Government of France. He sought an asylum in England, accompanied by his wife, his step-children, and two infant children by her second marriage.

The exiles established themselves in St. John's Wood. It would probably have been impossible to have devised a situation better adapted to evoke the characteristics which Nature had implanted in Mathilde. Those who knew her only in later life can, nevertheless, easily realise the charm and at the same time the singularity which must have attached to her childhood. Lovely with a rare loveliness she must have been, but there is a difficulty in conceiving her with the tastes and pursuits of ordinary girlhood. The independence which distinguished her for good and ill must have been exceedingly conspicuous. All circumstances conspired to nurture it—the estrangement from her native land, the devotion with which her