BEING at Lowther Lodge on the 21st of May, I was sent for by the Crown Princess of Germany, who was most kind and gracious. “I have read all your books. I always buy them as soon as ever they come out, and I have so much wished to see you.” She told me that she had been to Hurstmonceaux to visit my mother’s grave, and that she had one of her strong presentiments as to the place coming back into our family, adding, “And I do so hope it will.” She talked of the dear Madame de Bunsen with the greatest affection, and then of the many branches of the Bunsen family. When my little audience of about ten minutes was over, she said with great sweetness, “I am afraid I am keeping you much too long from all your other friends.” She pressed me to come to stay with her at Potsdam. I said that I was going to Berlin to visit the Bunsens. She said, “Oh, but you must come to me; I can show quite as many things, and I can certainly show you a great many more people than the Bunsens can.” I said that I feared my visit to Berlin would be during her approaching absence in Switzerland. She said, “Well, you can go to the Bunsens in the summer when I am away, and then in the winter you can come again to see me: Berlin is not so very far off.”
As spring advanced my Life of the Baroness Bunsen was so far completed as to be ready for the inspection of her children. I therefore decided to take it to them in Germany. Feeling how impossible it would be to meet all the various wishes and tastes of such a hydra-headed family, I determined only to feel bound by the wishes of the two unmarried daughters, Frances and Emilia, and any one of their brothers whom they might choose. They selected George.
I turned first towards the Rhineland to visit the Dowager Princess of Wied, and profit by her recollections of one who had ever been one of the most valued of her friends.
On the last day of May I reached Cologne, and found there a succession of telegrams from the Princess of Wied desiring me to come to her. She did not exactly say that she expected me to stay beyond the day, so I did not like to take my luggage, and was sorry, when I found my room ready and that I was expected for a long visit, that I had sent it on.
Early on June 1, I went to Bonn. The place struck me much from its being so embowered in green and flowers. In a villa thus surrounded I found the well-known authoress Fräulein von Weling,[280] whom I surprised in bargaining for ready-plucked chickens at her door. She is a very interesting person, received me with that cordial simplicity which is so charming in Germans, and in a minute had put on her bonnet to go with me to the cemetery by a quiet walk through nursery-gardens. The churchyard itself is half hidden in pinks and roses. In the centre stands an old chapel of extreme beauty, transferred stone for stone by the King of Prussia from a solitary position in the fields. Buried in flowers is the grave where the dear friends of my childhood rest side by side. Close by is that of their brother-like friend, the noble old Brandis, his invalid wife, and his son Johannes. Farther off, but still near, are the graves of the old Arndt, Niebuhr and his Gretchen, Schumann, and the widow and son of Schiller. Then we went to Bunsen’s house, with the three-windowed room where he died, the garden with its view over the Rhine to the Sieben Gebirge, and the pavilion where he gave his last birthday feast.
It is a long ascent of an hour and a half from Neuwied through orchards and meadows radiant with wild-flowers to Segenhaus, standing on the crest of the mountain, which is literally “the House of Blessing” to all around it. The beautiful spacious rooms, full of books and pictures, look down over a steep declivity upon an immense view of the Rhineland. The Princess came in immediately with a most warm welcome—a noble, beautiful woman in a black dress, something like that one sees in pictures of Spanish Queens-Dowager, with snow-white hair drawn back under a long black veil. After a life of love, having lost all those who gave its greatest charm, she still finds much happiness in making herself the mother of her people, and the centre of good to the Rhineland from her high forest-home. After a few minutes spent in explaining the towns in the vast map-like view below us, she said, “There is a lady here who is anxious to make your acquaintance, and who was delighted to hear that you were coming: it is the Queen of Sweden.” At that moment the doors were thrown open, and the Queen entered—of middle age, with a beautiful expression, and possessing, with the utmost regal dignity, the most perfect simplicity and even cordiality of manner. She desired me to sit by the Princess upon a divan facing her. She said that I must consider her at once as a friend; that, in a life of great troubles, the “Memorials” had been her greatest comfort; that she never went anywhere without them; that my mother had been for several years the intimate friend to whom she always had recourse, and in whose written thoughts she could always find something which answered to her own feeling and the difficulty of the moment. She asked after “Mary Lea,” and how old she was now. She also talked much and naturally of my Bunsen work, and entirely entered into all the difficulties of meeting the views of so large a family of varying dispositions.
The Princess took me away to see her own room with her family portraits and photographs. She spoke of her daughter, the Princess of Roumania,[281] “in her terrible position between Russia and Turkey.” Then she said, “I want to prepare you for something. At my daughter’s court there is a blind Roumanian noble who has an only daughter. She is deaf and dumb. I could not bear that they should never communicate, so I have taken her home with me, and I am teaching her to speak by making her hold her hand on my throat as I speak very slowly; and she is already learning, and, though it takes almost all my time, I am already rewarded by her making sounds which are intelligible to me.” When we went back into the other room, the young lady was there, a most strange being, making sounds inarticulate, but intelligible to the Princess. When she saw that the Princess was going to speak, she rushed across the room and held her hand on her throat, which had an almost terrible effect, like garrotting.
