ngely inferior to the
other women who had possessed his love, yet handsome, good-hearted,
cheerful, natural, physically desirable, and devoted to him body and
soul. Since the summer of 1788 she was really his wife, though the
Church was not called upon to consecrate their union until October 19,
1806. In the high circles in which he moved, a storm of indignation was
aroused by this union, which also lost for him the friendship of Frau
von Stein, a loss which he deeply regretted. However, Christiane Vulpius
gave him a calm and ordinary happiness that compensated him somewhat for
his ideal losses; she was sufficiently dear to him to move him to the
characteristic simile: "On the bank of the sea I wandered and looked for
shells: in one I found a pearl, it remains well guarded in my heart;"
and again the beautiful allegory of the sweet flower, brilliant as the
stars, which he dug out with all the roots and carried home, where it
continues to blossom.

Women's love bore, from the first, quite a different character in the
case of Schiller. He also had a good mother who believed in his genius
and his future greatness, but born and raised in needy circumstances,
and struggling with poverty all her life, she stood at an immense
distance from the patrician and associate of princes, Frau Aja, the
mother of Goethe.

Three widely differing women especially affected Schiller's life and
works. The influence upon his youth of Charlotte von Kalb, an
extraordinary, demoniacal woman, was, according to his own confession,
not beneficent. In later years, this highly gifted and unhappy woman had
the misfortune of affecting the lives of two other great poets: Jean
Paul and Holderlin. The former escaped from the grasp of the "Titanide"
whom he immortalized, nevertheless, in his "_Titan_"; the latter, the
God-gifted poet of "Hyperion," the singer of the passionate,
soul-stirring lyric poems in honor of another love, Diotima, died early
in the darkness of insanity. Schiller's love for Caroline and Charlotte
von Lengefeld, the former of whom was married to Wilhelm von Wolzogen,
presaged a terrible danger, similar to that to which Burger succumbed,
but which was averted by Caroline, who saved Schiller by smoothing the
path to a lawful and happy marriage with her young sister. The
correspondence between the three, Schiller and the Lengefeld sisters,
published by Schiller's daughter Emilie, Baroness von Gleichen-Russwurm,
sheds much light upon the