ral, poetic, with a melodious, beautiful soul, instilled into him
the sense of the beautiful and perchance gave him creative force.

Cornelia, Goethe's only sister, also powerfully influenced and inspired
him. She was to Goethe what Frederick the Great's favorite sister,
Wilhelmine, was to her brother. Goethe delineated the characteristics of
his charming mother in the character of Elizabeth, wife of Goetz von
Berlichingen. Poor abandoned Maria is, according to Goethe's allusions,
the martyred Friederike. Sister Cornelia inspired the play.

The abiding effect of woman's love upon Goethe becomes manifest when we
realize that an unhappily ending early love affair with Gretchen, a
young girl of Frankfort, remained imprinted upon his soul for more than
forty years, and served him as a prototype for his greatest, most
complex, and most pathetic heroine, Gretchen in _Faust_. It is true that
after the unfortunate ending of that romance at Frankfort he found
sufficient compensation in his love for Kaethe Schonkopf, the daughter of
a wine dealer in Leipzig, at whose restaurant he boarded when a student
of seventeen at the university. According to the portrait taken from the
gallery of Goethean women, Kaethe was a fascinating, round-faced girl.
She gave up her ardent lover when he tortured her too much with his
jealous whims, and the pain of that separation was dramatized by Goethe
in his earliest play, _The Caprice of the Lover_.

We have briefly mentioned Goethe's return, broken in health and spirit,
from Leipzig to Frankfort, the influence exerted upon him by Katherine
von Klettenberg, his transfer to the University of Strassburg, and his
idyl with Friederike of Sessenheim, which the most eminent
German-American literary critic Julius Goebel calls, however, more
fittingly "a tragedy." His famous poem, _The Rose on the Heath_, in
which the rose is passionately broken by the wanton boy in spite of her
protest, sums up in charming symbolism the sad story of Goethe's love
for the unfortunate Friederike. What this charming flower of the
parsonage had been to his youth, how he left her, the pangs of
conscience which tormented him for a long time, his unfailing memory of
her who never forgot him, and who died unmarried in 1813, all this
Goethe's genius characterized with psychological delicacy in his
autobiography: "Fiction and Truth".

Perhaps even more profound was the storm aroused in Goethe's soul
somewhat later by his love fo