oman. He
represents the sharp recoil from the frivolity of the _ancien regime_,
and the beginning of the third stage of love. His _Nouvelle Heloise_
(1759) was probably the first work in which sentimental love found
expression. In Goethe's _Werther_ (1774), which is a faithful portrayal
of the poet's personal feelings, it was represented more powerfully.
Werther's love was purely spiritual at its inception. "Lotte is sacred
to me. All desire is silent in her presence." But in the end he desires
her with unconquerable passion; a dream undeceives him about the nature
of his feelings, and as he clasps her in a passionate embrace he is
conscious of having reached the summit of his longing. This would seem
the goal of modern love, embodying all its previous stages. It is
interesting to find embodiments of the extreme poles in two incidental
characters; one has been driven mad by his adoring love for a woman and
wanders about the fields in November to gather flowers for his queen;
the other is a young peasant who kills his rival in jealous rage. But
Werther himself, steering a middle-course between these two extremes,
walks straight into modern love, which means death to him.

Both the _New Heloise_ and _Werther_ are, sentimentally, efforts to
reach the synthesis _via_ the soul. Friedrich Schlegel, in his famous
_Lucinda_ (1799), tried the opposite way. He has been savagely attacked
for it by one side and lauded to the skies by the other, and when "the
emancipation of the flesh" became the motto of the day, he was glorified
as a martyr. The philosopher and theologian Schleiermacher saw in
_Lucinda_ a delivery from the tyranny of centuries. "Love has become
whole again and of one piece," he exclaims, joyfully calling the poem "a
vision of a future world God knows how distant." "Love shall come again;
a new life shall unite and animate its broken limbs; it shall rule the
hearts and works of men in freedom and gladness, and supersede the
lifeless phantoms of fictitious virtues." Schleiermacher also voiced the
idea of the synthesis: "And why should we be arrested in this struggle
(_i.e._, between love as the flower of sensuousness and the intellectual
mystical component of love), when in all domains we are striving to
bring the ideas, born by the new development of humanity, into harmony
with the result of the work of past ages?" His _Confidential Letters on
Schlegel's Lucinda_ have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the
p