“Neuwied, 24th December 1860.—Oh! it is hard, very hard! the first absence from home, the first separation from mamma. You can realise what it is, and can understand that it is not easy, and particularly in this case. The Princess says that she will replace mamma. But a mother’s love cannot be replaced even by the warmest and noblest heart! Still I know she will be all to me that she can be, and that is very much. I well know what it means to be constantly in the society of distinguished and clever people. But I also know what it is to take a position which does not in reality belong to you, and to assume the right tone and the right manner there! Oh! shall I be at all able to do it? You can imagine in what an anxious state of tension I am, and how all my thoughts are centred in that one point.”
Such a child of nature as this daughter of a princely house had never appeared in Berlin before. They were not a little astonished at her.
“And I had taken the greatest pains to remain within the bounds of etiquette in the drawing-room, and to make conversation in a sensible manner.”
She felt most at home in the family of the Princess Hohenzollern,[2] who was spending the winter at Berlin. When, looking back to this time in later years, as Princess of Roumania, she wrote: “Had I only had an idea of all this, when I so enthusiastically admired the mother at Berlin. Or did I have a presentiment when I made friends with no one there but with Marie, and was nowhere so happy as in her family.” She also then shared in the studies of Princess Marie of Hohenzollern, now Countess of Flanders. The lectures which Professor Haagen held for them in the Museum were of particularly lively and lasting interest to her.
[2] Mother of the present King of Roumania.
It was here in Berlin that Princess Elizabeth met Prince Charles of Hohenzollern[3] for the first time. They say that as she was, according to her habit, rapidly jumping downstairs, she slipped on the last step, and that Prince Charles was able to prevent her from falling by catching her in his arms.
[3] Present King of Roumania.
From a letter of Prince Herman to his Daughter at Berlin.
“Neuwied, 23rd February 1861.
“It appears to me that you have seen and experienced much that is interesting if you review the variety of pictures which have passed before you during these last days. You can only learn an easy and versatile intercourse with people by constantly meeting different ones, for each has to be taken in a different way, according to his peculiarities. Goethe regards it as a proof of dulness, not cleverness, if one is bored in the society of others. He declares that we can learn from the most commonplace people, were it only not to be like them! You are a recruit in aristocratic ranks, and not the slightest failing must be detected in you. At Court you must learn the balancing step so that you may not lose your balance and fall downstairs, or morally stumble and upset. In youth all this is learnt in play, whereas it is a martyrdom to elderly people. But where one is gifted, as you are, with an endless source of internal happiness, all disagreeables which one experiences are but as a fleeting shadow over the sunshine of life. Since you went away joy has departed from this house! The gay little bird has flown, and is now fluttering from flower to flower. Sometimes it pricks itself with their thorns, but it flies on, careless of what is behind it. Still it avoids the thorns in future. Now, good-bye; may God bless you, you dear little runaway.”