which gratitude for her deliverance, filial affection, and the love
of a maiden for her hero are strangely blended. Afflicted with a disease
of the heart, she is subject to terrible convulsions, which increase the
tenderness of her protector for the doomed child. After one of these
attacks, in which she had been suffering frightful pain, we read:--

"He held her fast. She wept; and no tongue can express the force of
those tears. Her long hair had become unfastened and hung loose over her
shoulders. Her whole being seemed to be melting away.... At last she
raised herself up. A mild cheerfulness gleamed from her face. 'My
father!' she cried, 'you will not leave me! You will be my father! I
will be your child.' Softly, before the door, a harp began to sound. The
old Harper was bringing his heartiest songs as an evening sacrifice to
his friend."

Then bursts on the reader that world-famed song, in which the soul of
Mignon, with its unconquerable yearnings, is forever embalmed,--"Kennst
du das Land":--

"Know'st thou the land that bears the citron's bloom?
The golden orange glows 'mid verdant gloom,
A gentle wind from heaven's deep azure blows,
The myrtle low, and high the laurel grows,--
Know'st thou the land?[9]
Oh, there! oh, there!
Would I with thee, my best beloved, repair." ...

[Footnote 9: Literally, "Know'st thou it well?" But the word "well," in
this case, does not answer to the German _wohl_.]

The "Elective Affinities" has been strangely misinterpreted as having
an immoral tendency, as encouraging conjugal infidelity, and approving
"free love." That any one who has read the work with attention to the
end could so misjudge it seems incredible. Precisely the reverse of
this, its aim is to enforce the sanctity of the nuptial bond by showing
the tragic consequences resulting from its violation, though only in
thought and feeling....

Here, a word concerning one merit of Goethe which seems to me not to
have been sufficiently appreciated by even his admirers,--his loving
skill in the delineation of female character; the commanding place he
assigns to woman in his writings; his full recognition of the importance
of feminine influence in human destiny. The prophetic utterance, which
forms the conclusion of "Faust,"--"The ever womanly draws us on,"--is
the summing up of Goethe's own experience of life. Few men had ever such
wide opportunities of acqua