intance with women. If, on the one hand, his
loves had revealed to him the passional side of feminine nature, he had
enjoyed, on the other, the friendship of some of the purest and noblest
of womankind. Conspicuous among these are Fraeulein von Klettenberg and
the Duchess Luise, whom no one, says Lewes, ever speaks of but in terms
of veneration. No poet but Shakspeare, and scarcely Shakspeare, has set
before the world so rich a gallery of female portraits. They range from
the lowest to the highest,--from the wanton to the saint; they are drawn
in firm lines, and limned in imperishable colors, ... each bearing the
stamp of her own individuality, and each confessing a master's hand.
These may be considered as representing different phases of the poet's
experience,--different _stadia_ in his view of life. "The ever womanly
draws us on." So Goethe, of all men most susceptible of feminine
influence, was led by it from weakness to strength, from dissipation to
concentration, from doubt to clearness, from tumult to repose, from the
earthly to the heavenly.

"FAUST."

Goethe appears to have derived his knowledge of the Faust legend partly
from the work of Widmann, published in 1599,[10] partly from another
more modern in its form, which appeared in 1728, and partly from the
puppet plays exhibited in Frankfort and other cities of Germany, of
which that legend was then a favorite theme. He was not the only writer
of that day who made use of it. Some thirty of his contemporaries had
produced their "Fausts" during the interval which elapsed between the
inception and publication of his great work. Oblivion overtook them all,
with the exception of Lessing's, of which a few fragments are left; the
manuscript of the complete work was unaccountably lost on its way to the
publisher, between Dresden and Leipsic.

[Footnote 10: The earlier work of Spiess (1588) was translated into
English and furnished Marlowe with the subject-matter of his "Dr.
Faustus."]

The composition of "Faust," as we learn from Goethe's biography,
proceeded spasmodically, with many and long interruptions between the
inception and conclusion. Projected in 1769 at the age of twenty, it was
not completed till the year 1831, at the age of eighty-two....

But the effect of the long arrest, which after Goethe's removal to
Weimar delayed the completion of the "Faust," is most apparent in the
wide gulf which separates, as to character and style, the Second Part
f