TO MADAME VON DER WENSE, OF THE FAMILY OF AHLEFELD AT ZELL, LADY OF THE PRESIDENT VON DER WENSE.

It has frequently been said, that poetry, like love, cannot be commanded. This, my very amiable Friend must now acknowledge to be an error, since, if her memory be accurate with regard to trifles, she will recollect, that this Drama owes its origin solely and entirely to her commands.

One evening at Pyrmont, the weather being too wet and melancholy to permit of her enjoying the charms of nature, to which her pure soul is so closely allied, she had recourse to the[4] Temple of Thalia, where Naumann’s Opera of Cora happened to be represented. The performers were of a very inferior kind, and the only thing that pleased me during the evening, was that I had the good fortune to sit behind my Friend, who sometimes condescended to favour her humble servant with a little conversation. Among other remarks which the occasion called forth, she observed once, when the conclusion of an act gave us a short respite from being merely auditors, that the Opera at which we were present, contained excellent ground work for a Drama.

[4]

I felt that this idea ought rather to have originated with me, but I easily found an excuse for my apparent negligence, in the circumstance of my being in company with one whose powers of pleasing were so great and so various, as to preclude, wherever she was present, the intervention of any other thoughts but what her own perfections inspired. Yet I caught eagerly at the idea when once suggested, and declared to my friend that her commands only were requisite for the immediate employment of my pen upon[5] the subject. For a long time she evaded honouring me with such a command, preferring, in all that she said to encourage me to the undertaking, the politer language of exhortation, to which her gentle nature is more accustomed. I however insisted upon a positive command.

[5]

“Well then, I command it,” she said, at last, with the naïveté so peculiarly her own.—I made a low bow, and now have the honour of presenting to her my Virgin of the Sun. At her command the trembling maiden appears with downcast eyes in the anti-chamber, and hopes for permission humbly to wait there, till a friendly invitation shall call her to the toilette of her Patroness.

Virgin of the Sun

“Come nearer, gentle creature!—thou shalt be welcome to me for the sake of thy father, with whom I 

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