[1] A. Strodtmann: H. Heine's _Leben und Werke_, 1874, ii. 174, &c. [2] Cursed be the friend who is faithful to thee in trouble! Never shall a woman's loving heart cherish thee. [3] He _is_ beloved! Trust better prophets! [4] Th. Mundt: _Madonna_, pp. 142, 274, 326, 374, 406. [5] Mundt: _Litteratur der Gegenwart_, p. 353. [6] L. Tieck: _Gesammelte Novellen_, Breslau, 1855, i. 38, 79. XXXIII RAHEL, BETTINA, CHARLOTTE STIEGLITZ The representation of the relation between literature and politics, the history of literary events, and the delineation of the characters and work of the most eminent of the men who constituted Young Germany, do not sufficiently reveal to us the spirit, the psychical condition of the time. What is done, and what happens, is its outward manifestation. In books, effect is a first consideration; what is represented in them must be to a certain extent exaggerated, thrown into relief, if only for the sake of distinctness. To find the clue to the intellectual life _lived_ at any given period, we must get as close as possible to the living, feeling, individual, and we must not neglect to supplement the impression received from an observation of the leading men of the time by a study of its typical women. It is where there is more feeling than action, where, in spite of great originality, the formative, the fashioning power is too slight entirely to separate the production from the personality, that the student comes into closest contact with the life-springs of a period. A letter from a highly gifted woman tells us more of the living human being and its real emotions than a political speech or a tragedy. Not one of the few great women who ruled men's minds during the period under consideration produced a work of art; not one of them even attempted to. They neither wrote novels nor essays. Their literary influence was a directly personal influence, and their power of stirring men's minds was evidently due to the fact that something of the inmost essence of the period was expressed in their personalities. Their natures are unplastic, evasive; the contours of their spiritual lives are blurred and indistinct; this makes it difficult to delineate their characters, but makes it all the easier to feel the pulse of the time in their utterances.