In Germany the feeling in regard to her was not generally favorable. 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 splendor with which Madame de Staël flashed through the windings of the German mind. Schiller—poor man!—was quite pathetic over her amazing volubility, which left him, with his halting French, a hopeless distance behind her. It is rather comic to trace the dismay at her exhausting personality which pierces through all his admiration for, and interest in, her mind. To Goethe, who was coquetting at Jena, and wished the brilliant stranger to come there to him, Schiller later writes: “I saw the De Staël yesterday, in my house, and again to-day at the Dowager Duchess’s. One would be reminded of the sieve of the Danaïdes, if Oknos with his donkey did not then occur to one.” He fears she will have to discover that the Germans in Weimar can be fickle, as well as the French, unless it strikes her soon that it is time she went. To Körner he complained that the devil had brought the French female philosopher to torment him just in the middle of his new play.