Wanda, Vol. 1 (of 3)

'Doch!—alles was dazu mich trieb ; Gott!—war so gut, ach, war so lieb! ' Goethe
'A PERFECT WOMAN, NOBLY PLANN'D'
NÉE
COUNTESS VON HOHENTHAL
This book is inscribed
IN ADMIRATION AND AFFECTION
Doch—alles was dazu mich trieb, Gott! war so gut! ach, war so lieb!—GOETHE.
Towards the close of a summer's day in Russia a travelling carriage was compelled to pause before a little village whilst a smith rudely mended its broken wheel. The hamlet was composed of a few very poor dwellings grouped around a large low horse-shoe shaped building, which was the manorial mansion of the absent proprietor. It was gloomy, and dropping to decay; its many windows were barred and shuttered; the grass grew in its courts, and flowering weeds had time to seed and root themselves on its whitewashed walls.
Around it the level ground was at this season covered with green wheat, spreading for leagues on leagues, and billowing and undulating under the wind that blew from the steppes, like the green sea which it resembled. Farther on were woods of larch and clumps of willow; and in the distance, across the great plain to the westward, rolled a vast shining river, here golden with choking sand, here dun-coloured with turbid waves, here broken with islets and swamps of reeds, where the singing swan and the pelican made their nests.
It was in one of those far-off provinces through which the Volga rolls its sand-laden and yellow waves. The scene was bleak and mournful, though for many leagues the green corn spread and caught the timid sunshine and the shadow of the clouds. There were a few stunted willows near the house, and a few gashed pines; a dried-up lake was glittering with crystals of salt; the domes and minarets of a little city rose above the sky line far away to the south-east; and farther yet northward towered the peaks of the Ural Mountains; the wall of stone that divides Siberia from the living world. All was desolate, melancholy, isolated, even though the season was early summer; but the vastness of the view, the majesty of the river, the suggestion of the faint blue summits where the Urals rose against the sky, gave solemnity and a melancholy charm to a landscape that was otherwise monotonous and tedious.