The Friendships of Women

by William Rounseville Alger

Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,
And paints one darling object unpossessed.
How many years have whirled their rapid course
Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,
In fond affection, as in blood, allied,
Have wandered devious from each other's side,
Allowed to catch alone some transient view,
Scarce long enough to think the vision true!
Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;
While transport yet can swell the beating veins;
While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,
And fancy still retains some genial heat;
When evening bids each busy task be o'er,
Once let us meet again, to part no more!

That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart. There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle, he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all who came between them.

They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded: "Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest, behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,

"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid of a magic mirror."

A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years," Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies, all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and affectionate sincerity of their attachment.

There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.

Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.

The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,

The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.

They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.