“All right, you shall hear the first—there are ten of them in all.”
She read. They were glowing stanzas. I do not mean such as many of our up-to-date young girls print, volcanic outbursts of eroticism; but, within the range of the permissible, the respectably permissible, they were enthusiastic outpourings of heartfelt devotion. I thought them marvelous.
“You must send that to Grillparzer.”
“No, there must never a stranger see these poems—my love is my secret.”
“Your love? Why, surely that is only poetry; we don’t see anybody but the old schoolmaster and the minister; your verses are addressed to an ideal—”
“My ideal is alive; look here!”
She pushed the book over to me and pointed to the final poem. The next to the last line ended with the word adeln (unhappily I have forgotten the rest of the line), and the last ran
Weil ich dich liebe, Friedrich zu Hadeln.
(Because I love thee, Friedrich of Hadeln.)
“For dear heaven’s sake!” I exclaimed. It had given me a turn. There before me was the miracle. A real living love for a real living object. Elvira seemed to me transformed, and now the remembered figure of the Nassau ensign too came before my soul bathed in magical light. Yes, he was in truth handsome, and assuredly there was in his nature the power to adeln, “ennoble,” those who had learned to understand and to love him, the adorable Friedrich von Hadeln.