y mail. Frederick's successor directed "that a house
should be built for her adorned with all the allegories of the Muses."
In this she lived until 1791.

The estimate of her poetic gifts cannot be very high. She was a ready
rhymester of a rather mechanical sort, but she was the first of the line
of Germanic poetesses of the modern time, and as such her work deserves
study and, it may be, praise.

Woman's love is the mainspring of action in poetry. But the sensuous and
sensual side of woman's life not alone influenced the character and
nature of I may boldly say all the German poets of the storm and stress
period as well as of the great classical era. Their religious and
ethical being was also powerfully moved by intellectual women. Goethe
had become alienated from dogmatic religion, especially at the
University of Leipzig, and when he returned sick and despondent to his
native city, a friend of his mother, Fraulein von Klettenberg, by her
"presence soothed his stormy, divergent passions at least for moments,"
and even won him over for a time to pietism. The mystic notions of the
German Quakers, the Herrenhut brotherhood, besides studies in cabalistic
alchemy, took, at least for a time, deep root in his soul. In his prayer
he betrays an almost irrational longing for the union with God and
separation from earthly things: "O that I could for once be filled with
thee, Eternal One," and again: "Alas, this anxious deep torture of the
soul, how long does it last on this earth!" Although after his recovery
he was saved by his strong healthy nature from sentimental religious
weakness, he always preserved a genuine toleration for the religious
beliefs and errors of others, and his portrait of Fraulein von
Klettenberg in his Confessions of a Beautiful Soul, will always remain a
psychological masterpiece.

It was an intellectual woman, too, who succeeded in winning the poet
Fritz Stolberg over to the Roman Catholic Church. Princess Amalia
Galitzin, called the Christian Aspasia, in Miinster, the centre of
Westphalian Catholicism, gathered the North German Catholics as well as
the Orthodox Protestants around her, and exercised for a time a powerful
influence.

As women at all times affected the hearts and souls of the great poets,
there is not one who was not moulded by womanly affections, so they in
turn were remoulded by the respective lovers. This is proved by the
entire literature of the period. The great ballad poet Burger,