life was made of tears, smiles, dreams, fantasies, flutterings of
wings, too celestial for the gross air of earth. According to
another, she was too recklessly thorough, and used too shattering an
emphasis. In fact, both these sides were true. Gentz, the celebrated
politician, called her "a great man," and confessed himself to be, in
comparison, a woman. Yet no one who knew her could deny that she
strikingly possessed the best traits of her sex, purity, tenderness,
modesty, patience, and self-sacrifice. In 1813, during the horrors of
disease in Berlin, and the horrors of war in Prague, she gave herself
up with joy to nursing the sick and the wounded. "The feast of doing
good," she called it. "Never have I seen elsewhere," said Varnhagen,
"such a mass of masculine breadth and penetration, alongside of
which, however, swelled, without remission, the warm flow of womanly
mildness and beauty. Never have I seen an eye and a mouth animated
with such loveliness, and yet, at times, giving vent to such
outbreaks of enthusiasm and indignation."

Her intellectual power and her tact formed, no doubt, one strong
element of the attraction which drew and kept so many artists,
philosophers, preachers, statesmen, and brilliant social leaders by
her side. But her heroic and unconquerable truthfullness was a still
more royal and authoritative trait. She sought for truth; she spoke
truth; she indignantly denounced all falsehoods and shams. Some of
her sentences on this point seem burned into the page, as by the
flame of a blowpipe. "The whole literary and fashionable world is
baked together of lies." To those who expressed their respect and
admiration of her she said, "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul,
and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of homage: the rest
is conventionality." She wrote to a friend, "Never try to suppress a
generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling: despair or
discouragement is the only fruit of dry reasoning, unenlightened by
the heart." In the following sentence she betrays, by the law of
opposites, the deepest charm of such a nature as her own; namely, a
thoroughly sincere and fluent spontaneousness of character. "I have
just found out the thing that I most utterly hate: it is pedantry. To
see such a big nothing in full march is to me the most revolting and
the most unendurable of all sights."

Another fine and winning quality in Rahel was her profound interest
in exalted and original