mont he
first saw her portrait, and was three nights sleepless in consequence.
And when he came to see her, instead of a raw girl such as he had
hitherto fancied, he found an elegant woman of the world, whose culture
and experience had a singular fascination for him, tired as he was of
immaturity and overfondness. She sang well, played well, sketched well,
talked well, and showed her appreciation of the poet, not like a gushing
girl, but with the delicate tact of a woman of the world. Some years
after her first acquaintance with Goethe, Schiller thus writes to his
friend Koerner:--

"She is really a genuinely interesting person, and I quite
understand what has attached Goethe to her. Beautiful she can never
have been, but her countenance has a soft earnestness and a quite
peculiar openness. A healthy understanding, truth, and feeling lie
in her nature. She has more than a thousand letters from Goethe,
and from Italy he writes her every week. They say the connection is
perfectly pure and blameless."

Even before he went away from Weimar at all, the letters were incessant,
often trivial, and sometimes made up of homely details of eating and
drinking, but loving always. The reader who remembers Charlotte cutting
bread and butter will not be shocked at the poet eloquently begging his
true love to send him a sausage. All the years of his life in the
Gartenhaus are intimately associated with her. The whole spot speaks of
her. She was doubtless the grand passion of his life. But even this wore
itself out, and after his absence in Italy he never seemed to feel the
full ardor of his former love. He returned to Weimar still grateful to
her for the happiness she had given, still feeling for her a sincere
affection, but retaining little of the passion which for ten years she
had inspired. The feeling seemed to have died a natural death. It is not
recorded that she had ever really shared his fervor, but she greatly
resented his defection, and considered him ungrateful and disloyal to
the end.

It was about this time that he first made the acquaintance of Christine
Vulpius, who afterwards became his wife. She was the daughter of one of
those men whose drunkenness slowly but surely brings a whole family to
want. She was at this time very young. He thought her beautiful, and,
although uneducated, she had a quick wit, a lively spirit, a loving
heart, and great aptitude for domestic duties. She had n