Pilgrim Sorrow: A Cycle of Tales

Pilgrim Sorrow: A Cycle of Tales

ROUMANIA, Bulgaria, Servia, and the other new countries situated in the far East of Europe, are so apt to be associated in our minds with the tiresome and unanswered Eastern question, that we certainly give both land and people less attention than many of them deserve. And not least interesting among them all is Roumania, which during the Turkish war gained for itself the respect, and admiration of [Pg 4] its stronger brothers and sisters; and which has, in a graceful fairy tale, been described as "the spoiled child of Europe" by the lady who sits upon its throne. Writing fanciful stories, aphorisms, novelettes, and poems is this queen's delight, and she has, within the short time since she began to publish, acquired for herself a name among German authors. For she writes in German, which is her native tongue, and under the pseudonym of Carmen Sylva, in which she seeks some reminiscence of the forests that were her earliest and dearest friends. It was amid the green woods and the vine-clad hills of the Rhine that her young intelligence was unfolded; she was born in this much-sung region, indeed in its fairest part, and has a true German's pride in that noble river. As a child she sat for hours upon the [Pg 5] lap of the aged patriot-poet, E. M. Arndt, and he stimulated in her that love of her native land which was also hers by birthright, for her princely forefathers had fought and suffered in the cause of German liberation, and had never joined the Confederation of the Rhine. Carmen Sylva, or, more properly, Queen Elizabeth of Roumania, is the only daughter of Prince Hermann of Wied Neu-Wied, a tiny principality situated between Coblenz and Andernach; and here, surrounded by a devoted, simple, and cultured family, she spent her girlhood, whose quiet, even course was only interrupted at rare intervals by visits to the Berlin court and travels with her aunt, the Grand Duchess Helena of Russia. Her parents were anxious she should be taken out of the mournful home surroundings, where Sorrow [Pg 6] had taken up an abode she rarely quitted. Sickness and suffering among those around her had made Princess Elizabeth early acquainted with pain. In the last number of the present cycle the reader may notice that the tone changes and becomes elegiac and subjective. Though slightly veiled, it is impossible to ignore that this is an autobiography, that the soul of the queen is laid bare before us; and a fair and noble soul it is. Indeed, those who are best acquainted with the details of her life, can best see how exactly they have been reproduced. There is, to begin with, her undaunted courage and desire to know, her love of music, in which she attained a certain proficiency under the tuition of Madame Schumann and Rubinstein, but whose execution she has had [Pg 7] to abandon owing to weakened health, though the listening to music remains to her a source of keen delight and enthusiasm. The woods that surrounded her castle home were, as we have seen, her earliest and most intimate friends, to whom she confided all her childish griefs and aspirations, who alone were allowed to listen to the lyrics she sang and penned in secret, who told her fairy tales in the rustling of their leaves, and who comforted her sorrows. At the age of eleven (not two years, as the fable says) it was her lot to witness the nobly borne death struggles of a most gifted and lovable younger brother, whose memory has remained to her a religion, and whose life she has written for her family, illustrated with over two hundred paintings from her own pencil. For five years after the boy's death her mother was [Pg 8] prostrated upon a couch of sickness, while the Prince, her father, was a permanent invalid, suffering from chronic lung disease that grew yearly more hopeless. Her girlhood's friend, too, "the fair maiden flower," she saw fade and die. No wonder her eyes grew weak with weeping! It was then she was sent traveling to distract her. While at St. Petersburg she had a severe attack of typhus fever, and before she was convalescent she was told that during her absence her beloved father had been laid in the grave. Then she grew homesick for the old house in which she had seen so many die, and for a long time she was sad and weary of her life. "Must every thing I love be borne to the grave?" she asks in a plaintive little song, written in her diary at that time. In poetry she found her only outlet, her only consolation; [Pg 9] but as yet she did not publish; these utterances were for herself alone, to give herself relief and voice. Then at last she was aroused to work and duty by the claims of matrimony, which for a long while she had resisted. Her desires had not been towards marriage, and she had once playfully said that the only throne that could tempt her would be that of Roumania; there she could find something for her hand to do. In 1869 Prince Charles of Hohenzollern asked her to be his bride, and share with him that newly-founded throne. And here she did find the work "mountains high," of which Sorrow tells her; and how nobly, admirably, wisely she has attacked these labors, what she has done and does towards civilizing and educating her half-barbarian subjects, that lives in their hearts, is repeated by [Pg 10] their tongues, and has already found echo in song and story. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 46262
Author: Sylva, Carmen
Release Date: Jul 12, 2014
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Translator: Zimmern, Helen, 1846-1934