Foremost among the intellectual guardians of the noble traditions of old German life was Annette von Droste-Hiilshoff. Simplicity and an ardent religious feeling permeate her poetry, which she produced in abundance in spite of many obstacles put in the way of her intellectual pursuits by a prejudiced, bigoted, aristocratic family. Her poetry is rooted in the desire to induce the new "stormers" to cling to the old and tried German traditions of morality, faith, and patriarchal institutions. "Cling to thy friend, cling to thy word, cling to thy faith, cling to thyself," is her creed. "Who would exchange his blood for strange ichor (even though it were the blood of the gods)! Do not reject the Cherub of thy cradle; his wing will rustle to thee from every leaf! Do not suck dry the blood of thy heart, to animate therewith a bastard of thy soul." Next important in her noble mission is Betty Paoli (Elizabeth Glück). Her thesis was: Church and society, fame and honor are the proper domain of man; woman can find her supreme happiness only in true, faithful, pure love for one man, and only once in life. Betty Paoli writes: "God has not sent me out, and has not given me the strength to aspire gloriously with a consecrated hand for the palm of victory. Let him be immortalized in marble and in brass who won them: I am nothing but a heart that has loved much and suffered much; and all my poetry is but an audible revelation of all the quiet pains of which a woman's soul is capable." According to her it is woman's destiny to subject her life to the magic charm of love, to sacrifice all her desires and inclinations to love: "My proud head defied boldly the lightning of the storm; but when thou saidst: 'I love thee!', I sank quiet and weeping at thy feet How weak am I!" In reality her happiness in love was short; the beloved one betrayed and deserted her; the deep sorrows of her heart find eloquent expression in touching and passionate melodies. Luise Hensel's poems are simple and melodious, and are filled with a childlike humility. God and heaven are the motives of her song. There is a long series of women poets and novelists, who are defenders of the old faith, and whose works, though frequently insignificant, are yet noble monuments for German women of our own time who have offered a bold front to emancipation gone mad. The impossibility of mentioning even the most eminent names of the German authors and poets is manifest when we consider the vast array of German women writers of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, catalogued by Schindel in a biographical work, published in Leipzig in 1823-1825; and in the two volumes of a Lexicon of German Women of the Pen by Sophie Pataky, which was issued in Berlin in 1898. A. Ungherini's Biography of Famous Women (Turin and Paris, 1892), also furnishes thousands of names of famous German women.