" Jean took Bettina in his arms, but she gently freed herself, and said to the abbé, "I wishI wish your blessing."

Thayer accepts the entanglement with Bettina as a fact, and thinks it was, at that crisis in Beethoven's life, "a happy circumstance that Bettina Brentano came, with her beauty, her charm, and her spirit, to lead his thoughts in other paths.

A graceful English song-writer of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Campion, who was as fond as Bettina of the figure of the flower and the sun, through which she symbolized her relation to Goethe, has in his verses anticipated her pose and her tone of agitated expectancy: "Is [he] come?