Youth and First Years in Stockholm 47 in her time, the much talked of "Night- Countess," who slept by day and rode out with torches and four black horses by night — a haughty and imperious lady! A kinsman and foster-brother of Ellen's grandfather, one Count Posse, had married Princess Canino, niece of Napoleon I, also a romantic love-union. The glamour of tragic love hung over Stafio, one of the grandfather's estates. There, a German princess, Dorothea von Zettvitz, had lived many years, a fugitive, because of love, from the small German Court of the eighteenth century where she had spent her youth. All these romantic associations have played their part in Ellen Key's mental and emotional world, which from childhood was influenced by the conception of the greatness and signi- ficance of love. She had then "fallen in love with love, " as she once so quaintly wrote. Ellen Key's nearest of kin, her paternal and maternal grandparents as well as her own parents, had all experienced love and happiness m marriage. Thus we find her bom and bred m the consciousness of great love as of the highest value to life. When she was eighteen years old, her mother I ^ /