for it beyond the good practice for herself and the gratitude of others. Her preface contains some excellent things, giving a view of Goethe more moderate than that which Carlyle had just brought into vogue, though she still was ardent and admiring enough. But she points out very well — though perhaps emphasizing them too much — some of the limitations of Goethe’s nature. She does not even admit him to be in the highest sense an artist, but says, “I think he had the artist’s eye and the artist’s hand, but not the artist’s love of structure,” — a distinction admirably put.
From the subject of Goethe followed naturally, in those days, that of Bettina Brentano, whose correspondence with the poet, translated in an attractive German-English by herself, had appeared in England in 1837, and had been reprinted at Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1841. Margaret Fuller, in the “Dial” in January, 1842,[1] had called attention to another work from the same source: the letters that had passed, at an earlier period than the Goethe correspondence, between Bettina and her friend Caroline von Günderode. These letters were published at Leipzig in 1840, after the death of Günderode. They were apparently written in the years 1805-06, when Bettina was about sixteen; and she in her letters to Goethe’s mother, published in “Correspondence of a Child,” gives an account of this friend and her tragic death.
- ↑ Dial, ii. 313.
