Page:Poetical works of Mathilde Blind.djvu/48

22 after clay, with a dogged patience, till I found my mind capable of grasping an idea. The large, strong truths gradually saturated my mind, and I literally drank in that chapter on the 'comparison between moral and intellectual laws.' Gradually my mind seemed to recover as from a long sickness, and to rebound with a vigour and energy difficult to describe. Had I ever loved poetry before? or the earth and the sea? or the sun and the sky? for now all these came back to me like lovers long parted. Song continually vibrated in me, and floated round me on shimmering wing. And yet, all the while, there was a great sorrow at my heart, patient and still, which never moved away. I think I know now what Goethe meant by 'the divine depths of pain.'"

Except for the German ode already mentioned as composed for Schiller's centenary in 1859, Mathilde made her first appearance as an authoress in 1867, in a little volume of poems published under the pseudonym of Claude Lake. Exceedingly slight as these were, they yet contained sufficient proof that the author was a poet. A certain element of school-girlishness may be accounted for, either by the pieces being partly of considerably earlier date, or by the youthful freshness of feeling which, in spite of thought and study and disappointment, and struggles with herself and her surroundings, she yet retained in a surprising degree. The frequent exuberance of her spirits had in the previous year been sobered by a grievous catastrophe, the death by his own hand of her brother Ferdinand, a noble-spirited but too impetuous youth, who, in a transport of patriotic indignation against Prince Bismarck, attempted the minister's life. Bismarck was at the time accused—although, as future events showed, erroneously—of being on the verge of ruining Germany by a causeless