have been the lot of Meta, if left on the earth alone, and desolate. If Klopstock acted differently, let him not be too severely arraigned; he was but a man, and differently constituted. With great sensibility, he possessed, by nature, an elasticity of spirit which could rebound, as it were, from the very depths of grief: his sorrow, intense at first, found many outward resources:-he could speak, he could write; his vivacity of imagination pictured to him Meta happy; and his habitual religious feeling made him acquiesce in his own privation; he could please himself with visiting her grave, and every year he planted it with white lilies, " because the lily was the most exalted among flowers, and she was the most exalted among women." He had many friends, to whom the confiding simplicity of his character had endeared him all his life he seems : to have clung to friendship as a child clings to the breast of the mother; he was accustomed to seek and find relief in sympathy; and sympathy, deeply * Memoirs. felt and strongly expressed, was all around him. With his high intellect and profound feeling, there was ever a child-like buoyancy in the mind of Klopstock, which gained him the title of der ewigen jungling" The ever young, or the youth for ever."* His mind never fell into "the sear and yellow leaf," it was a perpetual spring: the flowers grew and withered, and blossomed again,—a neverfailing succession of fragrance and beauty; when the rose wounded him, he gathered the lily; when the lily died on his bosom, he cherished the myrtle. And he was most happy in such a character, for in him it was allied to the highest virtue and genius, and equally remote from weakness and selfishness. About four years after the death of Meta, he became extremely attached to a young girl of Blackenburg, whose name was Dona; she loved and admired him in return, but naturally felt some Klopstock says of himself, "it is not my nature to be happy or miserable by halves: having once discarded melancholy, I am ready to welcome happiness."-Klopstock and his Friends, p. 164. distrust in the warmth of his attachment; and he addressed to her a little poem, in which, tenderly alluding to Meta, he assures Dona that she is not less dear to him or less necessary to his happi ness And such is man's fidelity! This intended marriage never took place. Twenty-five years afterwards, when Klopstock was in his sixtieth year, he married Johanna von Wentham, a near relation of his Meta; an excellent and amiable woman, whose affectionate attention cheered the remaining years of his life. Klopstock died at Hamburg in 1813, at the age of eighty his remains were attended to the grave by all the magistrates, the diplomatic corps, the clergy, foreign generals, and a concourse of about fifty thousand persons. His sacred poems were * Du zweifelst dass ich dich wie Meta liebe? Wie Meta lieb' Ich Done dich ! Dies, saget dir mein hertz liebe vol Mein ganzes hertz! &c. placed on his coffin, and in the intervals of the chanting, the ministering clergyman took up the book, and read aloud the fine passage in the Messiah, describing the death of the righteous.— Happy are they who have so consecrated their genius to the honour of Him who bestowed it, that the productions of their early youth may be placed without profanation on their tomb! He was buried under a lime-tree in the churchyard of Ottensen, by the side of his Meta and her infant,-- Seed sown by God, to ripen for the harvest. 182 CHAPTER XI. CONJUGAL POETRY CONTINUED. BONNIE JEAN. It was as Burns's wife as well as his early love, that Bonnie Jean lives immortalized in her poet's songs, and that her name is destined to float in music from pole to pole. When they first met, Burns was about six-and-twenty, and Jean Armour " but a young thing," Wi' tempting lips and roguish e'en, the pride, the beauty, and the favourite toast of the village of Mauchline, where her father lived. To an early period of their attachment, or to the fond recollection of it in after times, we owe some of Burns's most beautiful and impassioned songs, as Come, let me take thee to this breast, And pledge we ne'er shall sunder! And I'll spurn as vilest dust, The world's wealth and grandeur, &c. |