In the brilliant springtide of Olympia's career, when she stood before us in Grecian virgin guise, fooled to the top of her bent by the applause and flattery of an entire city, with syntax–laws for a rule of life, a knowledge of words in the place of all experience of things, classicality for a summum bonum, and æsthetic appreciation of the beautiful as sole means of satisfying every need and capacity for worship, the question was suggested, shaping itself into the words so familiar, and, howsoever diversely understood, most important to every man,—How is this Olympia to be saved? And the question has been dwelt on, because the peculiar interest attaching to her story is to be found in the particularly well–marked development of the saving process, whether as studied by those who, like herself, deem it to have been accomplished by her adoption of a special creed, or by those who find it in the working of her awakened moral nature. Both to the religionist and the moralist Olympia is a specially "well–marked specimen;" and both will concur in affirming that, whatever may have been the saving influence, a very noble specimen of womanhood was the result.
SAVED!
Now, to one looking from the moral stand–point, it seems, as has been said in a former chapter, that the question was satisfactorily answered, when the course of our story had shown the heroine under the successive influences of sorrow and adversity, of a true and devoted love, and of the adoption of a persecuted faith, be it a true or false one. And we have now reached the time when this discipline will show its fruit in a "saved" life;—a life fitted to make its close the starting–point of further progress.
CHAPTER VIII.
The home at Schweinfurth.
"An obscure town; situated at the extremity of Bavaria, and watered by an unknown river—such, then was to be the asylum of this young woman,"[100] writes her French biographer. But this is not a correct description of Schweinfurth as it was in the sixteenth century.
Far from being an obscure town, it was a free imperial city, celebrated and important as the greatest corn–market in all central Germany. Far from being situated at the extremity of Bavaria, it was in the midst of the most central district of German civilisation and progress, and the Maine was not in the sixteenth, or, unless on the banks of the Seine, is it in the nineteenth century, by any means an unknown river. Nor were "silence" and "isolation" the doom of Olympia in her home at Schweinfurth. Writing thence soon after her arrival to an Italian friend, she says: "Besides, there are several good men in this place, for whose sake we are glad to be here; and most gladly resign to you your flesh–pots of Egypt;[101]—istas ollas Egyptiacas."