HENSEL, LUISE. - German poetess, daughter of a Lutheran pastor, born at Linum in Brandenburg on 30 March 1798, died at Paderborn on 18 Dec. 1876.
Having converted to Catholicism in 1818, after an adolescence remarkable for precocious intelligence and mystical impulses, she left Berlin (where her mother, after the death of her husband in 1809, had moved with her children, and where Clemens Brentano had vainly fallen in love with her, dedicating to her several of his finest verses), and thereafter spent a large part of her life between Münster and the Rhineland, as a governess and nurse in aristocratic families. Not a few of her Lieder, almost all of religious content, became popular, because of the sincere faith with which they are imbued, even before the author’s name was known (Sursum corda I, Abendgebet, Beim Lesen der heiligen Schrift, etc.). H. Cardauns edited the complete edition (Ratisbon 1923).