scorning
the tenets of morality, leads a dissolute life; and this life is
reflected even in his best work. He marries Dorette Leonhardt, while he
already loves her younger sister Molly, and his passion for the latter
grows more impetuous during his married life. As Molly returns his
criminal love, the lawful wife resigns herself to a relation which
destroys the lives of all three. After having lost both his wives in
rapid succession, he commits the error of marrying a third wife, Elise
Hahn, who, carried away by his poetry, offers herself to Burger, whom
she has never seen, and who romantically accepts her hand. But "the
delusion was short, repentance was long." Elise's fickleness, frivolity,
and manifest infidelity soon brought about a divorce. Broken in heart
and spirit, the great poet, whose life had been wrecked by "the eternal
feminine," which, instead of uplifting him, dragged him into the mire,
died, solitary, wretched, and reduced to poverty and self-contempt. His
poetry bears the traces of his ruined life.

On the other hand, the simple, virtuous and idyllic, pastoral life in
Germany is charmingly portrayed in Voss's _Luise_, and is illuminated by
Goethe's poetic genius in _Hermann and Dorothea_. Goethe, however, not
only depicted idyllic life in poetry, but actually lived it in his
student days in Strassburg with Friederike Brion, the pastor's daughter,
of Sessenheim. The art of painting has immortalized in numberless
pictures the charming idyllic forms of the lovely shepherdesses, the
Luises, the Mariannes. Miller's Siegwart, a _Cloister Story_, is one of
the many picture books of the feminine soul of that complex period of
simplicity and enlightenment. Chodowiecki, the great painter, is perhaps
the best delineator of those typical figures of German womanhood.

Sophie La Roche, who had in her youth revolutionized the mind of the
great poet Christoph Martin Wieland, was one of the most remarkable
women of her time. Wieland, in his youth, conceived a passionate love
for Sophie, whom he introduced into the treasure house of poetry, but
his enthusiastic love for her did not terminate in marriage. She
remained, however, during all her life his intimate friend, though
Goethe's overwhelming genius made Wieland's star pale in her later
estimate. As the wife of Maximilian La Roche, councillor of the Elector
of Mainz, she turned to French literature, especially to Voltaire and
Rousseau, and made her home "the place o