thought and life of Germany's greatest
dramatist and of two noble women. Caroline's biography of Schiller,
which appeared in 1830, collected from reminiscences of the family, his
own letters, and information furnished by his friends, still breathes
her love and admiring affection for her immortal friend. The greatest
record, however, of the powerful influence women exerted upon Schiller
is to be found in his works, not only in the dramas, but especially in
the lyric poems, wherein a wonderful galaxy of noble women appear, and
in which there is not one chord untouched that ever vibrated through
man's heart.

Romanticism, the reaction against Classicism which had become icy and
petrified in the "epigons," or weak successors of the great classical
poets, entered upon its victorious course at the beginning of the
nineteenth century. The group of women-authors, who stand, as it were,
in the second zone from classicism, Amalie von Hellwig, Elisa von der
Recke, Louise Brachmann, Agnes Franz, Helmina von Chezy, Johanna
Schopenhauer, all authors of considerable talent and grace, are
nevertheless far surpassed by the versatility and poetic impressiveness
of the literary women of Romanticism. They are the inspirers and
coworkers of the founders of the movement, the brothers Schlegel, Tieck,
Novalis, Brentano, Arnim, Kleist, and others. It is true that the "blue
flower of Romanticism" was not conducive to virtue in love. Romanticists
respected marriage the least of all sacred things, and a marriage _a
trois_, says Theobald Ziegler, was quite a common thing, and the
question only remained whether a marriage _a quatre_ was not even a
pleasanter thing. In this, however, Romanticism was but a reaction
against the Philistinism and prudery of the opposite pole of
civilization at that period, where woman was oppressed, and a different
standard of morality, and even of religion, was demanded from her than
from man. Frederick Schlegel is not far wrong when he says that in the
ordinary wedded life of the time both parties "live on, side by side, in
a relation of mutual contempt." As, at the time of Pericles the great
and superior hetaira, Aspasia, raised the social status of woman in
general, and succeeded in elevating her in culture to the standard of
the most intellectual men, so, during the first decades of the
nineteenth century woman was raised to a higher plane through a long
series of moral aberrations. Emancipation was frequently mi