Mathilde Blind British author, was born at Mannheim on the 21st of March 1841. Her father was a banker named Cohen, but she took the name of Blind after her step-father, the political writer, Karl Blind (1826—1907), one of the exiled leaders of the Baden insurrection in 1848—1849, and an ardent supporter of the various 19th-century movements for the freedom and autonomy of struggling nationalities.
The family was compelled to take refuge in England, where Mathilde devoted herself to literature and to the higher education of women. She produced also three long poems, “The Prophecy of St Oran” (1881), “The Heather on Fire” , (1886), an ‘indignant protest against the evictions in the Highlands , and “The Ascent of Man” (1888), which was to be the epic of the theory of evolution. She wrote biographies of George Eliot (1883) and Madame Roland (1886), and translated D.F. Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New’ (1873—1874) and the Memoirs of Marie Bashkirtse , (1890). She died on the 26th of November 1896, bequeathing her property to Newnbam College, Cambridge.
THE land lay deluged by the Moon;
The molten silver of the lake
Shimmered in many a broad lagoon
Between grey isles, whose copse and brake
...
The April rain, the April rain,
Comes slanting down in fitful showers,
Then from the furrow shoots the grain,
And banks are fledged with nestling flowers;
...
Oh, brown Eyes with long black lashes,
Young brown Eyes,
Depths of night from which there flashes
Lightning as of summer skies,
...
Blossom of the apple trees!
Mossy trunks all gnarled and hoary,
Grey boughs tipped with rose-veined glory,
Clustered petals soft as fleece
...
All night, all day, in dizzy, downward flight,
Fell the wild-whirling, vague, chaotic snow,
Till every landmark of the earth below,
Trees, moorlands, roads, and each familiar sight
...