Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/36

 10 ignored or apparently non-existent in some depth of being below an habitual consciousness—something latent within leaping up, irresistibly yearning to that glorified region as if they two belonged to each other from everlasting to everlasting. What a sensation, momentary and yet to be kept through life as one of its treasures! "

"It was a great leap," she says, "from the schoolroom to the group of brilliant revolutionists with whom, a week or two after my arrival, I was on the most intimate terms. So many witty, original fascinating, dare-devil spirits as formed Madame Helder's [i.e., Herwegh's] circle it is rare to meet together." Unfortunately the account she must have intended to give of this circle was either never committed to writing, or has been lost. The only persons mentioned by their real names in her Swiss recollections are the eminent critic Kuno Fischer and his wife. The latter had enjoyed what many ladies would consider the singular advantage of being brought up as a boy. In consequence she knew Latin and Greek, and bathed in the Lake of Zurich in the depth of winter: if it was frozen, well, then the ice was broken. We presume not to determine whether these circumstances stood in any sort of connection with her lack of personal attractions, "one of the plainest of women, thin-lipped and coarse-skinned, with the profile of a crow and its sharp, vigilant eye." She taught Mathilde Latin; instruction in Old and Middle German was imparted by Professor Fischer himself, "one of the mildest of men, with the abstract gaze of the scholar for whom the external world hardly exists." He took an interest in his pupil, and not merely construed the Minnesingers with her, but expounded the principles of philology, "taking the words as if they were living beings. It was a life full of rich and diversified impressions."