“This winter I have also made a plot for a tragedy, ‘Meister Manole.’ But I want a quiet time to write it in. I have also a long poem, ‘Nemesis,’ in my head, and the beginning of four novels. But what appears to me the best does not strike others so. It is lucky that amongst ten persons each one thinks a different poem the best.
Woodbury Compy.
QUEEN ELIZABETH,
IN ROUMANIAN COSTUME.
“As to the great poem which I have still to write, I often have the feeling that it will come one day, but not by doing nothing. A day of rest is nearly a misfortune to me. I have at once the feeling of being unable to work. It is quite childish! I feel as if I were drifting into the sea, into infinite space in deepest melancholy, and could not find any firm footing! Just try how you feel when you have not written anything for two days. Certainly I have not yet composed a Nausikaa, and cannot rest on my laurels, but am constantly incited by the feeling of not having done anything yet.”
Most of the works of the Queen are already translated into various languages, or are being translated. Many of her poems have also been set to music.
Augustus Bungert, the poet and composer of Tetralogy, the World of Homer, Nausikaa, the Return of Odysseus, &c., has edited the finest poems from “The Witch,” “My Rest,” and “Songs of the Artisans,” and called them “Poems of a Queen;” as well as “My Rhine,” “Dramas in Songs,” “Kalafat,” &c. Hallström, Reinecke, Gounod, and Madame Augusta Holmès in Paris have arranged Carmen Sylva’s poems as songs.
Before the year comes to an end the ever-restlessly working imagination of the royal poetess will have created new works which we are unable to mention here.
