Browse Items Browse Collections About. The Beauty of Soninberg. A Letter from Wiesbaden. Title The Beauty of Soninberg. Subject Germany, travel, love and devotion. Description The narrator writes a letter describing her travels in Germany, and recounts a love story about a beautiful young woman in the town of Soninberg. Creator Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Source The Evergreen May , pp. Publisher New York: J. Date Contributor D.
Format Document. Language English. Certainly my sympathies are not more diffusive than yours, but I am a more patient listener. You have but to listen to get those little personal revelations every one is ready to make, if you but touch the electric chord aright that binds you to your humble fellow-beings. In going from Brussels to Waterloo a few weeks since, I took a seat on the box beside the coachman—a frank true-hearted looking youth—for the advantage of gaining answers to the questions that are constantly occurring to the traveller in a scene so full of novelty as is every part of the Old World to an American eye.
Before he set us down again in Brussels, he had told me a history of personal hopes, projects and disappointments, that with a little skilful spinning would have furnished warp and wool for an octavo volume, with an appendix of ancestral anecdotes that he had better have effaced from the family archives.
This will be a pretty good proof to you that I have not foregone my habits in crossing the ocean, but here at Wiesbaden I am cut off from their indulgence by my ignorance of the language. However, the period for the egotism of love is long past, and Cristine, instead of damming up her feelings to fret and wear inwardly, permits them to flow out in all kindly sympathies. I just saw her in a position to illustrate this gracious disposition. She was standing on the platform of the well before the Duke of Nassau's new palace.
She had filled her tub with water, and with the aid of a friend these people by a sort of general social compact always interchange this kind office had placed it on her head. My attention was arrested by seeing Cristine, who is no dawdler—no loiterer—stopping to listen to this friend, and as I came near enough to see her friend's face, I thought I too would have stood with the tub of water on my head, or up to my throat in the fountain, if necessary, to listen to the earnest speech of this peasant girl who had one of the sweetest faces I ever saw—and her whole heart was in it.
