on occasion. That she was not more dazzled by Napoleon must be considered a lucky accident.
In Germany the feeling in regard to her was not generally favourable. The mightiest minds, indeed, admired her great intellect; and Goethe's unwilling homage is the brightest jewel in her crown. But it was as a woman that she excited a somewhat sour antipathy. Her plaintive little friend Madame de Beaumont had called her a tourbillon, and Heine has only added a doubtful picturesqueness to this description when designating her a "whirlwind in petticoats." But as a most disturbing element she certainly did introduce herself into German society. Rahel Varnhagen acidly—it is difficult to help thinking ungenerously—echoes the usual complaint of her obstreperousness, saying, with striking lack of originality, by the way, "She is nothing to me but an inconvenient hurricane."
Schiller, as is well known, was infinitely more magnanimous. He had made up his mind as to her kind of intellect before she came. In 1798 he had already pronounced her to be of an "exalted, reasoning, entirely unpoetical nature"; and although he clung, after seeing her, to his conviction that "of poetry she had no conception," he was obviously surprised and enchanted at her native goodness, her healthy simplicity of mind, and unaffectedness. To her penetration, brilliancy and vivacity, he does full justice. And if, as her book on Germany afterwards showed, his statement that "nothing existed for her unless her torch could illuminate it," was as misleading as are most metaphors, still its descriptiveness enables one exactly to understand the particular sort of splendour with which Madame de Staël flashed
