ealize in individual artistic creations
are, according to the philosophic conception, simply the universal types
of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. Out of the external realization of
this idea arises the wide Pantheon of art, whose architect and builder
is the self-developing spirit of beauty, for the completion of which,
however, the history of the world will require its evolution of
countless ages.

THE LIFE OF BETTINA VON ARNIM

BY HENRY WOOD, PH.D. Professor of German, Johns Hopkins University

The ten years succeeding the publication of _Goethe's Briefwechsel mit
einem Kinde_ (1835) coincided in point of time with the awakening in
England, through Thomas Carlyle, and in America as well, of an intense
if not yet profound interest in German Literature. It must remain a
tribute to the ideal enthusiasm of the movement that, among the first
German works to receive a permanent welcome and become domiciled in
American literary circles, was that strange and glittering mass, flotsam
of a great poet's life dislodged and jettisoned from his personality by
the subtle arts of the "Child" who had now gathered it up again and was
presenting it to the astonished world. At a time when the _Foreign
Quarterly Review_ in England (1838) was vainly endeavoring to persuade
"Madame von Arnim" not to undertake the translation of her work, "whose
unrestrained effusions far exceed the-bounds authorized by English
decorum," Margaret Fuller was preparing in Boston to translate Bettina's
_Guenderode_, and soon felt herself in a position to state[3] that
"_Goethe's Correspondence with a Child_ is as popular here as in
Germany." In one respect, indeed, Bettina's vogue in America remained
for the rest of her lifetime more secure than in her own country, where
the publication of her later politico-sociological works, _Dies Buch
gehoert dem Koenig_ (1843) and _Gespraeche mit Daemonen_ (1852), was
followed by a temporary eclipse of her popularity, and where also her
fate, in persistently associating her with Rahel, the wife of Varnhagen,
as a foil for Rahel's brilliant but transitory glitter, had
tarnished her own fame.[4]

[Illustration: BETTINA VON ARNIM]

For these things American readers of the _Correspondence_ seem to have
cared but little. While German critics were deliberating as to what
grouping of characteristics could best express Bettina as a type, the
American public had already discovered in her a rare personality--the
r