CONTENTS.

PILGRIM SORROW.

INTRODUCTION.

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 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 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 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 to abandon owing to weakened health, though the listening to music remains to her a source of keen delight and enthusiasm. The woods that