Her book, which in a little introductory parable she dedicates to the king, is written in the form of conversations. Goethe's mother is the chief speaker. There is much warm feeling in the book, and a considerable amount of information on the subject of the distress among the lower classes, but too little political insight to make it readable nowadays. The authoress reaches a climax with the words: "Our sign is the banner of liberty; its brightness lights up the black darkness of the times; its brilliancy dazzles and terrifies those who are on the shore, but we are glad and rejoice.... Dangers? Liberty knows no dangers! To it everything is possible. The storm itself, the wildest of all storms, is the captain of our ship."[6] Such sentiments were not likely to meet with a favourable reception at the Prussian court of that day. The book created a sensation, but put an end to the good understanding between Bettina and the king. It naturally only increased the political discontent of the masses, and a pretext was found for seizing her next book (on Clemens Brentano), because a repetition of the same sort of thing was feared. Long before this, however, Bettina had received the unanimous homage of the younger generation. Those interested should read Gutzkow's account of his first visit to her, Mundt's description of her, Kühne's poetical appreciation. Even Robert Prutz, severe as he is on all the representatives and models of Young Germany, numbers himself among her admirers. "Bettina's letters are," he says, "the last bright blaze of Romanticism, the sparkling, crackling fireworks with which it closes its great festival; but they are at the same time the funeral pile upon which it consumes itself, the pillar of fire which rises from its ashes--and shows us the way." The third woman whose life and character made a deep impression on the generation of 1830 was Charlotte Stieglitz, the daughter of a Leipzig merchant named Willhöft. As a child Charlotte was quiet and thoughtful, as a young girl there was something nun-like about her. In 1822 Heinrich Stieglitz, then in his twenty-first year, came to Leipzig to study philology. From no fault of his own he had been mixed up in the prosecution of the demagogues in Göttingen. He was a handsome young fellow, audacious, and, to judge by his looks, passionate; and he was a poet. Charlotte was then a beautiful girl of sixteen, whose appearance suggested the possession of that supernatural quality which the Germans in olden days ascribed to those women whom they believed to possess the gift of prophecy. She had a high, open, intellectual forehead, curly brown hair piled up in a tower-like coiffure, a thin, aquiline nose, a beautiful mouth, large, star-like brown eyes that looked brightly and bravely out into the world. She spoke low, but sang with a full, clear voice.