Letters of Lydia Maria Child, with a biographical introduction by John G. Whittier and an appendix by Wendell Phillips.

LETTERS. 51
" It is evident that Goethe was to Bettine merely the
algebraic X that stands for the unknown quantity."
MlIr. Brisbane, the Fourier Association man, told
me that he was well acquainted with Bettine in Germany, and that no one who knew her would doubt
for a moment that she did all the strange things recorded in her letters. He said she would talk with
him by the two hours together, lying all quirled up
in a heap on the carpet, and as often as any way with
her feet bare; but that this, and other tricks more
odd still, were played with such innocent and infantile grace that, withered as she was, he could not help
regarding her like a child three years old. Yet, in the
midst of her wildest frolics, she would start off suddenly and wing the highest flights of poetic romance,
or dive into the deepest vein of spiritual philosophy.
The artists were plagued to death with her, for she
would go into all their studios just when she chose,
seize their clay, tools, or brushes, and model or paint
to her heart's content; often leaving her work unfinished and seizing upon fresh clay or canvas to embody some new freak of her brain. Some of these
productions, he said, were of exquisite grace and
beauty. Altogether, she was the strangest yet, the
most captivating mortal he ever met. She had a son
twenty years old, a man observable for practical wisdom and business tact. She was then a little withered, odd-looking old woman; but with a fire in her
dark eye easily kindled into brilliant beauty.
As for conventional forms, the giant soul should
indeed rend them like cobwebs when they cross the
pathway of Truth and Freedom. But there is an
eternal distinction between right and wrong, Goethe
and Bettine to the contrary notwithstanding.