stions they
kindled, re-appear in the series of enchanting, glorious, adorable
women--Gretchen, Natalia, Ottilia, Iphigenia, Makaria, and the rest--
who, with their artless affection, their self-renouncement, their
wisdom, their dignity, their holiness, their sufferings, appear in
his master-works, breathing presentments of life, for the edification
and delight of generations of readers. He has recognized, more
profoundly than any other author, the essentially feminine form of
that divine principle of disinterested love, that impulse of pure
self-abnegation, in which resides the redemptive power of humanity;
and has set it forth with incomparable clearness and constancy. At
the close of Faust, he has given it statement in a form which
associates his genius with that of Dante, and in a kindred height. It
is the womanly element, he would say, worshipful and self-denying
love, that draws us ever forward, redeeming and uplifting our grosser
souls:--

Das ewig weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.

Wieland and Sophia de la Roche were profoundly attached to each other
during the greater part of their lives. He and his beloved wife were
buried beside her; and a tasteful monument erected over them, according
to his orders. It bears the inscription, in German, composed by himself:--

Love and Friendship joined these kindred souls in life,
And their mortal part is covered by this common stone.

Hoelderlin, whose soaring and fiery soul was caged in too exquisite
an organization, lived, for some time, when he first became sick,
in a peasant's hut, beside a brook, sleeping with open doors,
spending hours, every day, reciting Greek poems to the murmur of the
stream. The princess of Homburg, who greatly admired his genius,
and his deep, pure sentiment, had made him a present of a grand
piano. In the coming-on of his madness he cut most of the strings.
On the few keys that still sounded he continued to fantasy until
his insanity grew so engrossing, that it was necessary to remove
him to an asylum. Silvio Pellico, the story of whose sufferings in
the prison of Spielberg, has carried his plaintive memory into all
lands, and the Marchioness Giulia di Barolo were a pair of friends
brought together as by a special appointment of Heaven.

When the holy and gentle poet, patriot, and Christian came
out of his prison, with a broken constitution and a wounded heart,
into a bleak and prizeless world, the Marchioness--who had long been
a mother to th