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She was a woman of much literary talent, which found employment later in a novel, 'Agnes von Lilien', and in her excellent memoir of Schiller. The other daughter was unmarried and bore the auspicious name of Charlotte. Lotte von Lengefeld, whose memory Is cherished with idealizing tenderness by the Germans, was now twenty-one years old, a demure maiden whose eyes spake more than her tongue.
The grand duke of that German Florence was at this time gathering around him the most eminent of the German intellects; and he was eager to enroll Schiller in the body of his professors. In 1799 Schiller received the chair of civil history; and not long after he married Miss Lengefeld, with whom he had been for some time acquainted.
We had scarcely left the street with the hotel behind us, when he began to speak of Schiller, and pointed out the mountain which bore his name and to which in his "Walk" he had cried: "Hail! oh my Mount, with radiant crimson peak." Then he told us of the Lengefeld sisters, whom the poet had so often met here, and one of whom, Charlotte, afterward became his wife.
It happened that the professorship at the University of Jena was about to be vacant, and through Goethe's solicitations Schiller was appointed to it in 1789. In the February following he obtained the hand of Fräulein Lengefeld. "Life is quite a different thing by the side of a beloved wife," he wrote a few months later; "the world again clothes itself around me in poetic forms."
Friendship, taste, truth and beauty will produce a greater effect upon me when a continual succession of sweet, beneficent, domestic feelings attune me to joy and warm up my torpid being. In mid-winter Lotte von Lengefeld came to Weimar for the social season and Schiller saw her occasionally with steadily increasing interest.
Thence he went to see his early patroness at Bauerbach, and on this journey, at Rudolstadt, he met the Fräulein Lengefeld, whose attractions made him loath to leave and eager to return. The visit was repeated next year, and this lady honoured him with a return of love.
This attitude of his was a great trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic character.
The early winter of 1791 brought with it a disastrous illness which shattered his health, doomed him for the rest of his days to an incessant battle with disease and finally carried him away prematurely at the age of forty-five. Among the acquaintances that he had made through his connection with the Lengefeld family was a little group of people in Erfurt.
None of all the places that formerly made my solitude interesting had anything to say to me. On his return fate was lurking for him at Rudolstadt, where his friend, Wilhelm von Wolzogen, introduced him to Frau von Lengefeld and her two daughters, 'Both creatures , Schiller wrote, 'are attractive, without being beautiful and please me much.
We had scarcely left the street with the hotel behind us, when he began to speak of Schiller, and pointed out the mountain which bore his name and to which in his "Walk" he had cried: "Hail! oh my Mount, with radiant crimson peak." Then he told us of the Lengefeld sisters, whom the poet had so often met here, and one of whom, Charlotte, afterward became his wife.
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