“If I could tell you my whole story,” she writes to a friend in 1783, “if you could know the solemnity and repentance with which I look back upon it, you would withhold from me neither your pity nor your prayers.... Had I had in my sixteenth year, when, utterly inexperienced, I entered society with not the slightest knowledge of the world, left entirely to myself, surrounded by scenes whose meaning I could not grasp,—had I then had one true friend to warn me, to advise me; had his reason, his heart, his pureness of deed, inspired my respect and trust, indeed—indeed—I might have been a better woman.”
Later, after a delightful evening at the Princess of Dessau's, where Lavater also was, she wrote:—
“I was inexpressibly moved by your assurance that you thought of me in this circle. Could I have felt worthier of such society, the pleasure would undoubtedly have been more unalloyed. But, as it was—Still I must not complain.”
Such, briefly, is her story. She lived with the duke at the Solitude as well as here, and Hohenheim he made for her as beautiful as a fairy palace. He troubled neither her nor himself with scruples. His conscience was, indeed, not tender, and his life with her was unquestionably so innocent and idyllic in comparison with his mad past, that, to him at least, it no doubt seemed blameless. He loved her faithfully till his death, wrote to her when absent for a day or two as his good angel, with utter reverence as well as tenderest love. The proud respected her; the poorest and humblest came to her with their wants and sorrows.
She died in 1811 in her small, quiet court at Kirchheim unter Teck, where she had resided after the death of the duke; but her story and the remembrance of her eventful life will always haunt quiet Hohenheim, and invest it with a romance it cannot otherwise claim for itself.
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“NUREMBERG THE ANCIENT.”
The breeze of morning stole in and kissed our cheeks and whispered, “You have a day and a half to spend in dear, delicious old Nuremberg,—be up and doing!” Only a day and a half, and yet how infinitely better than no day at all there! We came, we saw, and were conquered, even by the huge knockers with bronze wreaths of Cupids and dragons' heads, the ornate, intricate locks, the massive doors, before we were within the portals of those proud patrician palaces with their stately inner courts and galleries, their frescos, painted windows and faded tapestries, time-stained grandeur, and all their relics of mediæval magnificence.
O, we stretched our day and a half well, and filled it full of treasures, and our hearts with lovely thoughts and pictures of the unique old town, its high quaint gables, stone balconies, beautiful fountains, double line of walls, and seventy sentinel towers; its castle and wide moat, where now great trees grow and prim little gardens; its arched bridges and streams, with shadows of the drooping foliage on the banks; its oriel windows; its narrow, shady ways and odd corners; its memories of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs, of Kaiser and knight and Meistersinger,—its Nurembergishness!
The St. Lorenz Church was our first halting-place. The whole world knows that its portal and painted windows are beautiful, and that it retains all the rich old objects of the Roman ritual; that being the condition under which Nuremberg pranced over in a twinkling to Protestantism, and people were ordered by the municipal authorities to believe to-day what they had disbelieved yesterday; and most of the world, perhaps, has seen the tabernacle for the vessels of the sacrament, but they who have not can never know from words how it rests on the bowed forms of its sculptor, Adam Kraft, and his two pupils and assistants, and rises like frozen spray sixty-four feet in the choir, with the warm light from the painted windows coloring its exquisite traceries and carvings. It looks like a holy thought or a hymn of praise caught in stone, aspiring heavenwards.