Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CHARITABLE INSTITUTIONS IN COBLENZ?ENTRANCE ON CONVENT LIFE. DURING the happy years of Amalie’s youth, a number of Christian men and women in Coblenz had formed a society for the purpose of alleviating the temporal and spiritual wants of the poor. The destitution caused by the war and by the famine of 1815 had been great, and inundations and epidemics had occasioned great misery and called forth the exercise of Christian charity. The centres of these efforts were the house of Councillor Dietz and the Orphanage of St. Barbara, founded by Countess Amalie Meerveldt, who became its first Superior. Several benevolent ladies entered into intimate relations with her, and lived a life of work and prayer, in many respects similar to that of nuns, without actually taking the vows, for there were no nuns in Coblenz at that time. Several zealous members of the clergy, like Seydel and Corneli, favoured those somewhat strict views; so earnest, indeed, were they, that the latter, in one of his sermons, gave it as his opinion that in the whole of Coblenz there were but three persons fit to go to heaven. His hearers thereupon ironically designated the preacher himself and apious couple, intimate friends of Cornell, as t’.ie favoured three. In the year 1817 a ladies’ association was founded at Coblenz, to provide, on an adequate scale, for the wants of the sick, the poor, and the orphans. Amongst its members were to be found some like Frau Briiggemann and Frau Longard, whose views were less narrow and less inclined to monasticism. Clemens Brentano, on coming to Coblenz, took an active part in all these charitable labours. He adorned them with all the charm of his poetic mind, and wrote many of his sweetest verses in praise of Christian charity. Besides the ladies’ ass…