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.
He found her, of all mortals within his experience, "the most gesticulative, combative, and talkative," even while admitting that she was almost the most cultivated and intellectual of women. But he declared that she destroyed all poetry in him, and waxed plaintive once again over his ineffectual struggles with French. He proclaimed that not to admire her for her fine mind and liberality of sentiment was impossible; and he breathed a sigh of the most unfeigned relief when she departed. All the Court personages felt that they had been having a severe time of it; although the bright and petulant Duchess Amelia was enchanted in the first instance, and wrote to Goethe imploring him to come and study the phenomenon. He resisted for a long while; but finally arrived—not without a previous sneer or two. Madame de Staël
