most touching friendship.  They contain many pretty sketches of Nature and delicate offerings of flowers.  In one he said:  ’If the season brought white lilies or blossomed in red roses, I would send them to you, but now you must be content with purple violets for a greeting’; and in another, because gold and purple are not allowable, he sends her flowers, that she may have ’her gold in crocuses, her purple in violets, and they may adorn her hair with even greater delight than she draws from their fragrance.’  Once, when following pious custom, she had withdrawn into her cell, his ‘straying thoughts go in search of her’: 

How quickly dost thou hide the light from mine eyes! for without thee I am o’erweighted by the clouds that bear me down, and though thou flee and hide thyself here but for a few short days, that month is longer than the whole hurrying year.  Prithee, let the joys of Easter bring thee back in safety, and so may a two-fold light return to us at once.

And when she comes out, he cries: 

Thou hadst robbed me of my happiness; now it returns to me with thee, thou makest me doubly celebrate this solemn festival....  Though the seedlings are only just beginning to shoot up from the furrows, yet I to-day will reap my harvest in seeing thee once more.  To-day do I gather in the fruit and lay the peaceful sheaves together.  Though the field is bare, nor decked with ears of corn, yet all, through thy return, is radiant fulness.

The comparison is tedious and spun out; but the idea is poetic.  We find it in the classics:  for instance, in Theocritus, when he praises Nais, whose beauty draws even Nature under her sway, and whose coming makes spring everywhere: 

Where has my light hidden herself from my straying eyes?  When I see not thee, I am ne’er satisfied.  Though the heavens be bright, though the clouds have fled, yet for me is the day sunless, if it hide thee from me.

The most touching evidence of this friendship is the poem On the Downfall of Thuringia.

‘One must,’ says Leo,[35] ’refer the chief excellence of the poem to the lady who tells the tale, must grant that the irresistible power of the description, the spectacle of the freshly open wounds, the sympathy in the consuming sorrow of a friend, gave unwonted power of the wing to this low-flying pen.’  Radegunde is thinking of her only remaining relative, Amalafried: 

When the wind murmurs, I listen if it bring me some news, but of all my kindred not even a shadow presents itself to me....  And thou, Amalafried, gentle son of my father’s brother, does no anxiety for me consume thy heart?  Hast thou forgotten what Radegunde was to thee in thy earliest years, and how much thou lovedst me, and how thou heldst the place of the father, mother, brother, and sister whom I had lost?  An hour absent from thee seemed to me eternal; now ages pass, and I never hear a word from thee.