The difference between Byron and Goethe in regard to feminine companionship lies chiefly in this,--that whilst Byron does not seem to have been very susceptible of romantic love (though he was often entangled in _liaisons_ more or less degrading), Goethe was constantly in love and imaginative in his passions, as might be expected from a poet. He appears to have encouraged himself in amorous fancies till they became almost or quite realities, as if to give himself that experience of various feeling out of which he afterwards created poems. He was himself clearly conscious that his poetry was a transformation of real experiences into artistic forms. The knowledge that he came by his poetry in this way would naturally lead him to encourage rather than stifle the sentiments which gave him his best materials. It is quite within the comprehensive powers of a complex nature that a poet might lead a dual life; being at the same time a man, ardent, very susceptible of all passionate emotions, and a poet, observing this passionate life and accumulating its results. In all this there is very little of what occupies us just now, the search for a satisfactory companionship. The woman with whom he most enjoyed that was the Baroness von Stein, but even this friendship was not ultimately satisfying and had not a permanent character. It lasted ten or eleven years, till his return from the Italian journey, when "she thought him cold, and her resource was--reproaches. The resource was more feminine than felicitous. Instead of sympathizing with him in his sorrow at leaving Italy, she felt the regret as an offence; and perhaps it was; but a truer, nobler nature would surely have known how to merge its own pain in sympathy with the pain of one beloved. He regretted Italy; she was not a compensation to him; she saw this, and her self-love suffered."[4] And so it ended. "He offered friendship in vain; he had wounded the self-love of a vain woman." Goethe's longest connection was with Christiane Vulpius, a woman quite unequal to him in station and culture, and in that respect immeasurably inferior to the Baroness von Stein, but superior to her in the power of affection, and able to charm and retain the poet by her lively, pleasant disposition and her perfect constancy. Gradually she rose in his esteem, and every year increased her influence over him. From the precarious position of a mistress out of his house she first attained that of a wife in all but the legal title, as he received her under his roof in defiance of all the good society of Weimar; and lastly she became his lawful wife, to the still greater scandal of the polite world. It may even be said that her promotion did not end here, for the final test of love is death; and when Christiane died she left behind her the deep and lasting sorrow that is happiness still to those who feel it, though happiness in its saddest form.