Among the German women authors of the last quarter of the nineteenth century who are really gifted with great poetic talent we meet with a poetess, a German princess on a foreign throne: Princess Elizabeth of Wied, Queen of Rumania, famous under the name of Carmen Sylva. She belongs to a family which for many generations has produced remarkable men. Her great-grandmother, Louise von Wied, was a poetess of considerable talent; other members of her family had excelled as naturalists, poets, and painters; three of her granduncles fell during the Napoleonic wars. The genius of her family seems, however, to have been concentrated in Carmen Sylva. She was exceedingly beautiful in her youth, and is charming to-day at the age of sixty. As a child of seven in Bonn, she frequently sat on the lap of the aged patriot-poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, who inspired the little princess with his patriotic tales. Her youthful sorrows, the loss of a beloved brother and of her father, and the protracted illness of her mother had a deep and melancholy influence upon her. Extended journeys to the south, to Sweden, and to Russia widened her poetic horizon. In 1869, Prince Carol of Rumania wooed the "Forest Rose," as she was called poetically; in 1870, all the wondrous feelings of a happy mother and a great poet were opened to her by the birth of a daughter; four years later she lost her child, and then she sings the words of despair: "For what purpose the great royal castle, we are but two!" She translated into German verses the Rumanian songs that had pleased her child, and later she translated many of the great Rumanian poems. There is in them the wild melancholy and simplicity of true popular ballads; there is the ring of a poetic sympathy with nature. They come straight from the heart of the people, and the translation is full of the same poetic feeling. Her Thoughts of a Queen (Paris, 1888) are worthy of a Pascal in their depth and earnestness and wide range, covering life, humanity, love, happiness, sorrow, pain, spirit, and art. She is of a wonderful intellectual and spiritual fertility. She wrote Pilgrim Sorrow, which has reached its fifth edition, and has been translated into English by Helen Zimmern. Sappho, Hammerstein, Storms, Some One Knocks (translated into French, prefaced by Pierre Loti), From Two Worlds, and Astra are universally recognized.
It is indeed a strange phenomenon that the two most gifted German poets are a queen and a peasant woman: Johanna Ambrosius. It is true that the refinement, the melody and sweetness of Carmen Sylva contrast with the painful plaints of poor Johanna, who suffered physical want many times during her life. Yet both have been in their way chastened in the school of pain and sorrow, only it was in one case the sorrow of the hut, in the other the sorrow of the royal palace.
Of the other women who have excelled in letters in recent times, the great majority exerted their influence through novelistic literature: Wilhelmine von Hillern, spirited, though somewhat too sensational; Louise von Francois, who skilfully characterizes higher sodety; Adelheid von Auer (pseudonym for Charlotte von Cosel), who depicts the social sins of the higher classes; Emmy von Dincklage, the painter of the life and nature of the low-lands on the Ems; E. Vely, Helene von Hiilsen, Fanny Arndt, Eudemia von Ballestrem, and scores of others whom in the evolutionary process of the present time we must not attempt to describe prematurely.
Indeed, life wells forth with ever increasing strength from the inexhaustible fountains of women's hearts, leaving the problem in the mind of the observer where all this activity is to end, and reminding us of the Earth-spirit's chant in Faust with reference to the "Creative Power" which eternally works and weaves:
"In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth and the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing