sunderstood,
and liberty degenerated into the license of the will of the flesh. It
would be impossible to absolve Romanticism from the reproach of license
in thought and life. We owe it to Caroline Schlegel and to Dorothea
Schlegel not to unveil their antecedents, and the way in which they
became the wives of the two romanticists. Their share in the movement of
liberation and in the work of their respective husbands is very
considerable, and, mayhap, is meritorious enough to cover their sins.
Tieck's sister Sophie wrote perhaps the finest novel of the
romanticists, Evremont (published in 1836 in Breslau), and his daughter
Dorothea was a classical translator of Shakespeare.

Bettina von Arnim (died 1859), Brentano's sister, is one of the most
ingenuous of poets. She possessed a rich imagination, but upon her was
the common curse of womanly genius, eccentricity, and inconstancy. These
frustrated her intense desire to attain a lasting fame. Her daughter,
Gisela von Arnim, wife of Hermann Grimm, is a notable writer of fairy
tales, and a dramatist of considerable merit. Another romanticist,
Caroline von Gunderode, who evinces much talent in her Poems and
Fancies, had no time for the development of her genius. An unhappy love
caused her to commit suicide at an early age. Such was also the end of
Heinrich von Kleist, the greatest romanticist, who died with Henriette
Vogel, the wife of another man, whom he killed at her own desire, in
1811. Theodor Korner, the patriot and soldier-poet of _Lyre and Sword_,
died young, on the battlefield, with a pure and noble love in his heart
for Toni Adamberger, a charming actress in Vienna, who was worthy of him
in every respect. Koerner's letter of 1812 to his father, Schiller's
friend, characterizes this noble type of German womanhood: "I may
confess without blushing, that without her I should indeed have perished
in the whirlpool beside me (_i.e._, in Vienna). You know me, my warm
blood, my strong constitution, my wild imagination; imagine this
impetuous soul of mine in this garden of delight and intoxicating joy,
and you will understand that only the love for this angel helped me to
be able to step forth boldly from the crowd and to say: Here is one who
has preserved a pure heart."

In spite of the many eminent women who arose during the first third of
the nineteenth century, there is nowhere in Germany anything like the
salon which has made French society so brilliant, the literary circ