ng notes to her we find strewn broadcast a
thousand germs of the grandest poetry. Her spirit hovers around him
everywhere; she possesses him entirely, body and soul; his feelings are
expressed constantly in inexhaustible lyrical, frank, and caressing
terms, more concise and natural than those in Werther. But the impetuous
lover in Werther's Sorrows is here a brother and true friend. He becomes
helpful, noble, and good, his own words, eager to cherish his friend, to
smooth her pathway through life; his extraordinary and extravagant
genius is calm and tempered. Frau von Stein brings forth the pure and
religious forces of his nature. His hot blood becomes chastened; he
himself calls the higher inner life that grows and strengthens itself
within him "Purity," and his poesy, too, becomes Purity realized. The
ethereal, ethical world in which his love for Charlotte forces him to
live is reflected in his lofty creations of immortal beauty, in his
superhuman contemplation of the universe, which is subject to change, it
is true, but a change according to firm, logical, and eternal laws. Such
is the influence of Frau von Stein upon Goethe, such her influence upon
the loftiest expression of German thought and feeling, or, briefly, upon
supreme German Classicism. Thus the dramas of the soul arise: _Iphigenie
and Tasso_. In the former, a pure priestess, though of an accursed
house, brings liberation, purification, happiness, not only to her
family, her race, but also to the barbarians, to the world at large. In
the latter, women are again the guardians of culture and morality: in
the character of the princess Leonore d'Este, who had learned toleration
in the hard school of sorrow, who saves the poet Tasso from false and
impure instincts, "as the enchanted man is easily and gladly saved from
intoxication and delusion by the presence of the divinity," Goethe has
united the traits of his guardian angels, Charlotte von Stein and
Louise, Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, daughter of the Landgravine Caroline of
Hesse, a great woman, of whom Wieland said, she would be queen of Europe
if he once were ruler of the Fates.

But such exaltation, such freedom from passion could not last forever.
That soul which Goethe knew so well, which "with tenacious organs holds
in love and clinging lust the world in its embraces," in the course of
time began to assert itself. And his intense need of sensual love was at
last satisfied by Christiane Vulpius, a woman stra