On Tuesday, the 5th of the April of last year, at an
early hour of the morning, a stranger in Hamburgh, passing through one
of its squares, might have observed with some surprise standing at the
door of a corner-house, the simple bier destined to carry paupers to
their churchyard-rest. And stopping for a moment, while the coffin,
formed of four black, rudely joined boards, was laid upon that bier, and
borne away by the appointed parish officials, we can imagine such a
stranger inquiring how it came to pass that the inmate of that
comfortable-looking house should have no other than a pauper's funeral.
The answer made to him would have been that the departed, the friend and
lover of the poor throughout her life, had loved them to the end; and
knowing, from her long experience among them, how painfully to many of
them the privations of their latter years were embittered by the
prospect of a parish burial, she had not only often expressed her wishes
on the subject, but left written directions that hers might be a
pauper's funeral, in the hopes thus to diminisn a prejudice too strong
to be reasoned away, and to reconcile some of her poor friends to the
rude bier on which her own honoured remains had lain. Struck by such a
reply, we can further imagine our stranger following the quick tread of
the bearers to the Horn Cemetery, where they deposit their light burden
on the church steps and retire. There crowds of rich and poor, young and
old, friends and acquaintances, pupil and fellow-workers, are waiting
for it; the unsightly boards are soon covered with wreaths and
spring-flowers, and eight brothers of the Rauhe Haus carry it to the
family vault. Hymns are sung, and solemn words spoken; the coffin
lowered, all eagerly press round for one last look more, aged eyes drop
tears, and little hands fling flowers into the grave, and then all
disperse with faces sorrowful indeed, and yet rejoicing too. Again we
imagine the question put: Who then was this Amelia Sieveking that
Hamburgh mourns to-day? Was she the centre of a happy home,
distinguished by position, wealth, genius? No, she was an unmarried
woman of the middle class; of small means and fair average intellect,
nothing more. And yet her influence was not only a power in her native
town, but it has radiated far beyond it. In Sweden, Denmark, Holland,
Switzerland, many have arisen who call her blessed, not only among the
poor, who reap the benefits of a more considerate and comprehensive
charity, but still more amongst women of her own class, who have been
stirred up by her example to such a career of systematic and successful
beneficence as would scarce have been practicable but for the charitable
organization of which she in Hamburgh was the founder.
We feel that the life of such a woman, however poor
in outward incident, cannot fail especially to interest the
earnest-minded of her own sex; and therefore we purpose, in the present
article, to indicate its quiet course from her thoughtful childhood
upwards, not pausing to comment upon the deepening religious
convictions, in the happy strength of which she lived and laboured, but
merely endeavouring to give a faithful sketch of the striking portrait
drawn by a female friend in the German volume now before us.
Bom in Hamburgh, in 1794, of a family loved and
honoured there for many generations, Amelia Sieveking appears to have
been from childhood singularly conscientious and persevering in her
endeavours after self-culture. Her own impression of her early days was
not a happy one. She could but indistinctly remember her mother, who
died when she was only five years old, and she seems to have missed a
mother's tenderness; but perhaps this very experience had something to
do with her own sweet indulgence to the children under her care; perhaps
the desultory nature of the education she received, and her freedom from
all external restraint, aided the development of her energies better
than any other training could have done. Here is a passage of one of her
latest works, in which she describes herself at the very time when her
brothers found the wild little girl a capital playfellow in their
out-door sports, and her young spirit was secretly vexed with
rationalistic doubts and difficulties; yet even then, "When I was
quite a child," wrote the earnest Christian woman; "before I knew
Christ as the Son of God and my Redeemer, the wish to be good and
virtuous had already arisen within me. I carried about a moral diary, I
devised small penalties (e.g., little pebbles put into my
shoes) by way of expiation for certain faults. I was also anxious to do
good, and secretly gave some of my pocket-money to the poor ; but I was
surprised to find that the prospect of these penances had so little
power to deter, and that these private acts of mercy did not give me
nearly so much pleasure as those for which I was praised by others." At
the age of fourteen, Amelia, or Malchen, as her German friends called
her, lost her father, her home, and the companionship of her brothers;
and being left totally unprovided for, had to adopt plans formed by her
relatives, to give up the French, English, and other lessons in which
her active mind had taken such delight, and to practise many small
economies and self-denials, trying at the time, but all calculated to
bring out her native strength of character. We have a glimpse given us
of a dreary season—not uncommon among the young, for whose encouragement
we record it here—when all occupations within reach appeared so
insignificant and so distasteful, that she would lie upon her bed for
hours and hours, idly dreaming of great things to be done in the future.
But this did not last long with our brave and thoughtful Malchen. "I
felt," she writes at a later period, "that in order not to deteriorate
morally, I needed a stronger incentive to systematic activity than I
found in my own circle. I looked around me for some pursuit that would
satisfy both heart and mind, and the Lord permitted me to find it in the
instruction of the young." Accordingly, at the age of nineteen, Malchen
opened her first little school. She had an especial love for children,
and an instinctive love for teaching, which had from time to time broken
out before; but, undecided as her own opinions were, it was rather a
perplexing matter to her to know what religious teaching to give them.
"I resolved," she said, ''that at least I would not profess to them more
certainly than I possessed. Before their confirmation I explained to
them the orthodox views of the atonement, adding that I myself did not
hold them, but that I considered my opinions on that head immature as
yet, and begged that their minds might not be prejudiced by them."
Meanwhile, Malchen's lot was a busy if not a happy one. Like other
girls, she had her preferences and illusions, but she had, as early as
eighteen, aspirations after higher than mere personal good, and schemes
for making an ''untenanted life " useful to others.
Her first great sorrow was the death of her favourite
brother Gustavus, a young theological student of great promise, with
whom she had been used freely to correspond upon the religious subjects
on which they still differed; though, as might be expected in one whose
office it was to teach children, she was steadily becoming more and more
positive in her creed. Her brother's peaceful, hopeful end, and the
blank he left in her affections, all tended to deepen her piety, and to
give earnestness to her prayers. Then came the disappointment of a
cherished hope; and we find her writing in her diary: "After all, could
any earthly good satisfy the longings of the immortal spirit? Father, if
thy purpose be, by the denial of my dearest hopes, to educate me for
eternal life,—Father, thy will be done! Only let me be thy obedient
child; free and strong in spirit, and filled with thy love: it is for
this I long; lead thou me to it." It was about this time that Thomas
a Kempis fell into her hands, and its holy, self-abnegating tone was
peculiarly congenial to her subdued and humble mood. Her naturally
ambitious and independent nature had yearned for guidance and direction,
and she would have gladly resorted to a confession if such could be in a
Protestant Church. Here are some of her utterances at this period,
showing the same habit of introspection and desire for improvement we
remarked in the little girl twelve years before, united to a far firmer
faith, though not as yet to full "joy in believing."
''How poor and barren my virtue, if indeed I dare to
speak of any virtue of mine ! Well do I know my two chief hindrances, if
only I knew how to overcome them. They are excessive desire for
enjoyment and anxiety for praise. ... I contradict too often and too
positively. The most different views may yet converge to some point of
union. Why, instead of seeking for this, do I always fix upon the points
of extremest divergence, and rend them still wider apart? . . . Alas!
shall I ever attain the art of self-forgetting? My nature is too
deficient in love. I am cold and proud; but I throw myself upon God's
guidance. He who is Love itself will draw me to himself."
And now comes what Malchen herself always looked upon
as the most important era of her life. She shall relate it in her own
words:—"29th August 1819.—O what a foretaste of heaven's bliss
fills my heart! A glorious light has dawned on me, which will, I feel,
glorify my whole existence. I was undecided in my belief. I felt the
necessity of getting at the truth respecting the doctrine of the
Atonement, so long foolishness in my estimate, and came to the blessed
resolve of referring all my difficulties to R—.[A theological friend of
her late brother.] He has just been with me; I have laid bare my heart
to him, and his replies have, as it were, awakened a new sense within,
and brought me much nearer to God and Christ, whom I now recognise to be
God indeed. Be my future ever so dark, I have a light within, that,
faithfully kept up, will guide me through the gloom. And will not this
light glorify a single life as well as any other? . . . Yes, it is
sweet, it is holy to believe. Where Reason can only reveal the darkness
and the chill of death, Faith sheds light and warmth on our heart."
From this time forth Malchen's life became
increasingly busy and increasingly cheerful. All her energies, absolved
now from the task of doubtfully inquiring after truth, went forth in
communicating it, and thus her intercourse with the children under her
care became to her a source of unmixed satisfaction. Her own strenuous
endeavours after personal holiness were both more humble and more
hopeful than before, when her self-reliance was her whole support. Now
we find her writing: "The sense of my own powerlessness but brings me
nearer to Him whose strength is made perfect in weakness. I give myself
up to His guidance, in cheerful trust that He will finish the work He
has begun, and help the poor stumbling child again and again to rise,
ay, should it stumble a hundred times a day. Sometimes I feel as though
I must lay bare to others the whole accumulated amount of my guilt, that
they may with me admire the riches of divine long-suffering."
As might be expected from such a feeling as this, in
one long accustomed to write down her own experiences, Malchen's present
happiness overflowed the limits of billets and diaries. She published
her first book, Meditations on certain Passages of Holy Writ,
which excited a good deal of attention. Many accused it of mysticism,
and some parents removed their elder children from her care. Still
worse, a spirit of controversy crept into her school-classes; but there
was the compensation of sympathy and appreciation, and having once taken
up the pen, Malchen, to the end of her busy career, did not lay it down.
In 1823, a fresh impetus was given to her early wish
of founding a Sisterhood of Mercy, by her meeting with Professor
Hartmann, a fervent-hearted and superior man, who strongly advocated
such institutions, and at once discovered Malchen's fitness to be at the
head of one. When we remember that from the age of eighteen this had
been her favourite dream; that in later years, when the "setting of a
great hope" left life for awhile blank and dreary, her cry had been, "If
not a happy wife and mother, then a Sister of Charity;" that her
constitutional love of authority, her desire for distinction, her
yearning wish to elevate the tone and enlarge the usefulness of
unmarried women, as well as her desire to spend and be spent in her
Master's service, were all in favour of such a scheme, —we think it an
instructive instance of sober-minded self-conquest, that she did not
throw herself headlong into it, but steadily balanced all conflicting
claims, and having determined that she was free to follow her own bent,
still further resolved to wait till her own character was more in
harmony with her ideal. "As yet," she writes to her brother, "I feel
myself an unworthy instrument for so high an undertaking. How much is
still lacking! How much hardness there still is in me! how much
pride!—ready to govern without knowing how to obey;—-how much more or
less latent self-love! Sometimes I fancy that I might do better once
admitted into the holy community; but I soon see the fallacy of such a
hope. As long as I am not a Sister of Mercy out of a community, I
am not fitted to be the founder of one." Nevertheless, the prospect
still continued to be a favourite one with her,—a cherished hope,
disciplining, supporting, cheering ; never indeed destined to be itself
realized, but fitting her for other work to which she was appointed. Her
love and pity for the empty lives of many lonely sister women around
her, and her desire to raise the unmarried lot into more of dignity and
contentment, had been, as we have seen, a main element in the sisterhood
scheme : pending the fulfilment of that, they must work out some other
way to their end. In addition to her various school-classes, Malchen now
began to organize female societies for the care of the sick and poor.
When the cholera broke out in 1830, she at once offered her services at
the hospital, and nursed the female patients with an intelligent
devotedness which awoke the medical men to the value of feminine
co-operation, and much increased her moral influence. In 1833, the
society was in full and successful operation. Here is a sketch of one of
Malchen's busy days at this period:—"I must confess," she writes, "that
I have some difficulty in overtaking all I have to do. At seven in the'
morning I walk into town (three miles off) with a basket of books, and
visit the poor; then my school occupies me till three. . . . Four days
in the week I go without any regular dinner : one of the children brings
me six pennyworth of butter-milk, with which I eat a slice of bread. In
the evening, I read aloud from six to eleven."
Evidently she was working too hard for her health,
but she saw the fruit of her labours. In 1842, the society numbered
fifty-three members ; and at the time of the great Hamburgh fire, Mal-chen's
Tenth Annual Report contained expressions of gratitude to seventeen
branch societies organized in the same manner, for their contributions
and sympathy with the parent society which she had founded; and so she
went on from year to year, blessed and a blessing. Foremost in every
charitable undertaking in her native city; appealed to as an authority
by fellow-workers in different countries; keeping up an extensive
correspondence; undertaking the education of six successive sets of
pupils, from the age of six or eight up to the time of their
confirmation, paying visits to her brother settled in England, to the
Queens of Denmark and Prussia, and publishing book after book on the
subjects most congenial to her own mind,—it is difficult to imagine a
life of fuller energy, which is but another word for the best happiness
God gives his creatures here below. She hardly seems to have known
discouragement and disappointment from the time when she found the
settled conviction she so long and earnestly sought. Always cheerful,
always hopeful, everywhere she found more good and more gratitude than
she looked for ; and if sometimes in the course of her charitable
ministrations she had to sorrow over the hardened in sin, she never
sorrowed without hope, for it was her stedfast belief—a belief so clear,
that she could not calmly bear difference of opinion on this head— that
" In humanity, when most sunken, there was a something divine;" and that
"when, in some remote eternity perhaps, the spark now hid in ashes
should kindle into flame, it would be made manifest that there was no
loving agency—however it might now seem labour lost—but had worked
together toward that final salvation."
We have seen how lavishly Malchen taxed her health
and strength. It is therefore with no surprise, though with much sorrow,
that we read of consumption setting in, and the valuable life closing at
the age of sixty-five. There was no melancholy in. the room of this good
woman's last sickness. She tells, in her farewell letter to her brother,
written about three weeks before the end, how she lay there on her sofa,
with the spring sun streaming in, surrounded by constantly renewed
flowers, and ministered to by loving friends of all classes. "The loud
sports and teasing ways of children" had never vexed her, and as long as
her physical strength could endure it, their laughter rang around her
where she lay. " The bond," she writes, '' that most firmly held me to
earth is now loosed. Yesterday, Sunday, the 5th of March, I took leave
of my children. I spoke to them for half an hour on 1 Peter ii. 10-17.
Naturally they were a good deal overcome, and I too was twice obliged to
pause. Yet I hope to have attained my object, which was to give them as
cheerful an idea as possible of death."
We will not dwell on the last sufferings of the
worn-out frame. Nor can we help regretting that biographers so often
think it necessary minutely to detail these: enough to know that "Death
was swallowed up in victory."
We close our short notice in the closing words of the
Memoir: "In more than one respect Amelia Sieveking deserves to be an
example to her sex. Not that all can closely imitate her career, for
that there must be a special calling ; but her truthfulness,
conscientiousness, and habitual self-control; the earnestness which she
carried into the smallest occupations; the strenuous pursuit of the
good; her severity to herself, and the leniency with which she judged of
others,—these are qualities which all may successfully strive after, not
indeed in their own strength, but in His who was the life of her life."