Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 May 1886 — Goethe’s Sweethearts. [ARTICLE]

Goethe’s Sweethearts.

The lady-loves, so numerous —often succeed irg each other without an interval between the old love and the new —how worthy, writes Julia Ward Howe, do they for the most part appear in what is Jknown of them ! Each has her individual charm. Thetiist, Frederika Brion, is a blooming rustic. The second, Lotte, is a girl in higher position, gay and sedate by turns, the bethrothed of Goethe’s friend, who bitterly resents the portraiture of l>oth given to the world in “Werther.” The third, fourth, and fifth—Anna, Sibylla, and Maximiliane—are less known to us. The sixth, Lili, is a city belle, the daughter ot a wealthy banker, and something of a coquet She was the inspirer of some of the poet’s best known lyrics, such as: Heart, my heart, what is this feeling That doth weigh on me so sore? Goethe follows her about to scenes of uncongenial gayety, in braided coat, gazing at her “amid the glare of chandeliers.” In his conversations with Eckermann he calls her his first, last, and only love, all others in comparison deserving only to bo classed as inclinations. When he says of this affection, “It has influenced my style,” he pays her the utmost tribute that a literary man can offer to a woman. He loves, but marries not. The first attractions find him precocious in feeling and mature enough in judgment to distrust himself. It costs him bitter tears to forsake sweethearts. We can imagine that the tears shed by them must have been more bitter, and cannot put out of sight the disadvantage suffered by these young girls Vhen, after every appearance of serious intention, the brilliant youth flits from them, and leaves them in (to say the least) awkward isolation. The fact that he did so leave them, reminds me of a serious device in Offenbach’s “Orphee aux Enfers.” Jupiter, w shing to make love to Pluto’s fair bride, descends in the form of a monstrous butterfly, and presently hands forward his card, saying: “Je suis le Baron de Jupiter.” The great Goethe, on the contrary, comes like a lord and departs like a butterfly. Some of the scientists of the day try to undermine the faith of their readers. They would snatch from the drowning man his life-preserver. As the medical properties of some plants can be educed onlv by distillation so our good qualities can be proved only by trials. No man can plough a field by.turning it over in his mind. i