This reminds us of Uhland's verse:
“Long, long didactic poems
I spin with busy wheel,
The lengthened yarns of epic
Keep running off my reel:
“My wheel itself has a lyrical whirr,
My cat has a tragic mew,
While my spindle plays the comic parts
And does the dancing too.”
Eugénie's charming Arcadian life, passed in the primitive occupations of spinning, sewing, superintending the kitchen—even going, like Homer's Nausicaa, to the margin of the stream to wash the linen in the running waters, and afterwards taking pleasure in spreading it all white on the green grass, or seeing it wave on the lines: all this, we say, without detracting from the poetry and [pg 134] grace of her nature, is enough to make us recall with a sigh the good old days when Queen Bertha span.