arrived at, or even aspired to, the blending of both emotions in
a higher intuition.

Even before his friendship with Frau von Stein, at the time of his
engagement to Lili Schoenemann, Goethe experienced a spiritual love for
a girl he had never seen. He calls Countess Auguste Stolberg "his
angel," "his only, only maiden," "his golden child," and says: "I have
an intuition that you will save me from great tribulation, and that no
other being on earth could do it." These letters also contain the
significant passage: "Miserable fate which has denied me a happy mean."
And touching the love of his youth, Lotte, Goethe wrote to Kestner: "I
really had no idea that all that was in her, for I always loved her far
too much to observe her."

The Princess in "Tasso" and "Iphigenia" who delivers Orestes from unrest
and insanity, are modelled on Charlotte. Tasso is unmistakably a
fantastic woman-worshipper, a fact of which Leonore is fully aware:

Now he exalts her to the starry heavens,
In radiant glory, and before that form
Bows down like angels in the realms above.
Then, stealing after her, through silent fields,
He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower.

He loves not us--forgive me what I say--
His lov'd ideal from the spheres he brings
And does invest it with the name we bear.
He has relinquished passion's fickle sway,
He clings no longer with delusion sweet
To outward form and beauty to atone
For brief excitement by disgust and hate.[4]

And Tasso says:

My very knees
Trembled beneath me and my spirit's strength
Was all required to hold myself erect,
And curb the strong desire to throw myself
Prostrate before her. Scarcely could I quell
The giddy rapture.

The significant avowal addressed by Dante to Beatrice: "Into a free man
thou transform'st a slave," the seal of all great spiritual love, was
repeated by Goethe in his letters to Charlotte, and is again repeated in
Tasso:

Over my spirit's depths there comes a change;
Relieved from dark perplexity I feel,
Free as a god, and all I owe to you.

Very interesting is also a remark which Goethe made to Eckermann: "Woman
is a silver vessel in which we men lay golden apples. I did not deduce
my idea of woman from reality, but I was born with it, or I conceived
it--God knows how." These notable words, deliberately pronounced, rev