important step.

Beyond a doubt his long drawn out and abject devotion to the wife of his
friend Max Loewenthal proved the most important single factor in his
life. It was during the year 1834, after his return from America, that
Lenau made the acquaintance of the Loewenthal family in Vienna.[91]
Sophie, who was the sister of his old comrade Fritz Kleyle, so attracted
the poet that he remained in the city for a number of weeks instead of
going at once to Stuttgart, as he had planned and promised. What at
first seemed an ideal friendship, increased in intensity until it
became, at least on Lenau's part, the very glow of passion. We have
already alluded to the poet's premature erotic instinct, an impulse
which he doubtless inherited from his sensual parents. In his numerous
letters and notes to Sophie, he has left us a remarkable record of the
intensity of his passion. Not even excepting Goethe's letters to Frau
von Stein, there are no love-letters in the German language to equal
these in literary or artistic merit; and never has any other German poet
addressed himself with more ardent devotion to a woman. A characteristic
difference between Hoelderlin and Lenau here becomes evident: the former,
even in his relations with Diotima, supersensual; the latter the very
incarnation of sensuality. Lenau was fully conscious of the tremendous
struggle with overpowering passion, and once confessed to his clerical
friend Martensen that only through the unassailable chastity of his
lady-love had his conscience remained void of offence. Almost any of his
innumerable protestations of love taken at random would seem like the
most extravagant attempt to give utterance to the inexpressible: "Gottes
starke Hand drueckt mich so fest an Dich, dass ich seufzen muss und
ringen mit erdrueckender Wonne, und meine Seele keinen Atem mehr hat,
wenn sie nicht Deine Liebe saugen kann. Ach Sophie! ach, liebe, liebe,
liebe Sophie!"[92] "Ich bete Dich an, Du bist mein Liebstes und
Hoechstes."[93] "Am sechsten Juni reis' ich ab, nichts darf mich halten.
Mir brennt Leib und Seele nach Dir. Du! O Sophie! Haett' ich Dich da! Das
Verlangen schmerzt, O Gott!"[94] Instead of experiencing the soothing
influences of a Diotima, Lenau's fate was to be engaged for ten long
years in a hot conflict between principle and passion, a conflict which
kept his naturally oversensitive nerves continually on the rack. He
himself expresses the detrimental effect of this situa