ecipient and custodian of Frau Rat's fondest memories of Goethe's
childhood; the "mythological nurse-maid,"[5] to whom, though in her
proper name as well as to her first-born son, successive editions of
Grimm's _Fairy Tales_ had been dedicated; the youthful friend of
Beethoven, from whom she had received treasured confidences as to the
influence exerted by Goethe's verse upon his mind and art; at times the
haunting Muse of Germany's greatest poet and, since 1811, the wife of
the most chivalrous of German poets, Achim von Arnim. If we add to these
characteristics the circumstance that, as Arnim's wife and as the mother
of their rarely endowed children, she had become the centre of a
distinguished and devoted circle in the Mark Brandenburg and in the
Prussian capital, the distance separating us from Ben Jonson's attitude
in his Epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke is no longer very great:
"Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother."[6]

It is, nevertheless, not through the aid of Ben Jonson's line, "fair and
wise and good as she," that Bettina may be described. She suggests far
rather an electrical, inspired, lyrical nature. The spokesman of this
literary estimate of Bettina was Margaret Fuller, and it is interesting
to note that this best of American critics at once instituted a
comparison between Bettina and Karoline von Guenderode, in which the
former was made to stand for Nature and the latter for Art. But it
appears to have escaped notice that Margaret Fuller, in presenting her
example of the artistic type, has, with no express intention, given us a
picture of herself.[7] The subtle harmonies, the soft aerial grace, the
multiplied traits, the soul delicately appareled, the soft dignity of
each look and gesture, the silvery spiritual clearness of an angel's
lyre, drawing from every form of life its eternal meaning--these are all
lineaments of the Countess of Pembroke type, and these characteristics
Margaret Fuller herself shared. How different is her description of
Bettina!

"Bettina, hovering from object to object, drawing new tides of vital
energy from all, living freshly alike in man and tree, loving the breath
of the damp earth as well as the flower which springs from it, bounding
over the fences of society as well as over the fences of the field,
intoxicated with the apprehension of each new mystery, never hushed into
silence by the highest, flying and singing like a bird, sobbing with the
hopelessness of an infant, pro