A Winter in Berlin. By Marie von Bunsen. (Edward Arnold.
5s.)—This is rather a sad story of a widow who brings her children to Berlin and gives them the best opportunities, she herself being noble, only to find their way of thinking worldly and sceptical, and diametrically opposite to hers. One marries a man beneath her, the other refuses the man she loves and mar- ries a roué, and the younger son, the only child who inherits his mother's real nobility of mind, dies of asthma. The story is soon told, but it gives a very pathetic picture of the disillusioning of a woman at once aristocratic to the core, but of singular breadth of mind and purity of purpose. The moral is obvious, though in no way intruded,—that no mother can begin to fight too soon against the tendency to aim only at pleasure and the means of procuring it, and to accept the inevitable when it does come with as good a grace as possible, and hope for the best. The Countess Zachow finds circumstances too strong for her, and her struggle against them is touched with a very sympathetic hand and a seeming though perhaps unintentional cynicism.
Previous page
