the tree of whose fame, with its eternally budding shoots,
had been committed to my care. Alas for the false world, which separated
us, and led me, poor blind child, away from my master!" Margaret
Fuller[9] called Goethe "my parent." But how sharp is the contrast
between her tone of reverent affection and the umbrageous jealousy of
Bettina!

And Goethe? While the poet safeguarded his fatherly relation to Bettina,
up to the break in 1811, in a hundred ways, we find him already, in
1807, inclosing in a letter to his mother the text of Sonnet I., which
had been inspired, in the first instance, by his friendship with Minna
Herzlieb. Bettina, left to draw her own conclusions, at once identified
herself with "Oreas" in the sonnet, and reproached herself for having
plunged, like a mountain avalanche, into the broad, full current of the
poet's life. From the letter of September 17th it is plain that Bettina
indulged, in all seriousness, the fanciful notion that her inspiration
was, in a sense, necessary to Goethe's fame. In her fond, mystical
interpretation of the sonnets, her heart seems to her the fruitful
furrow, the earth-womb, in which Goethe's songs are sown, and out of
which, accompanied by birth-pangs for her, they are destined to soar
aloft as heavenly poems. She closes with a partial application to
herself of the Biblical text (Luke 1. 40): "Blessed art thou among
women."

Goethe's detractors, particularly among the literary school called Young
Germany, were fond of repeating the insinuation of Fanny Tarnow (1835),
that the poet prized in Bettina only her capacity for idolizing him. But
Goethe's attitude toward the "Child" was far removed from that of
poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her
composition. G. von Loeper has well said of her composite traits: "The
tender radiance of first youth hovers over her descriptions; but, while
one is beholding, Bettina suddenly changes into a mischievous elf, and,
if we reach out to grasp the kobold, lo! a sibyl stands before us!"
Behind all Bettina's mobility there is a force of individuality, as
irresistible and as recurrent as the tides. Her brother Clemens and her
brother-in-law Savigny tried in vain to temper the violence of her
enthusiasm for the insurgent Tyrolese, of her flaming patriotism,
of her hatred of philistinism in every form, of her scorn for the
then fashionable neutrality and moderation in the expression of
political opinion.

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