Goethe, who seemed to have the secret of eternal youth, carried with him into middle life and old age much of the fresh vivacity of his early years. He was especially remarkable for his sensitiveness to feminine influence. While writing the “Wahlverwandtschaften” he had been strongly attracted by the beauty, thoughtfulness, and amiability of Wilhelmine Herzlieb, the foster-daughter of the wife of Herr Frommann, a bookseller at Jena, at whose house he was a frequent and welcome guest. Some of Wilhelmine’s qualities were reproduced in Ottilie, the lovely and pathetic figure who is overtaken by so sad a fate in the “Wahlverwandtschaften.” At the time when most of the poems in the “West-Oestlicher Divan” were written, he had a still more cordial relation with Marianne, the fascinating wife of his friend Geheimerath von Willemer, of Frankfort. In 1814 and 1815 he had much pleasant talk with Marianne in her home, and in 1815 she and her husband spent some happy days with him at Heidelberg. Marianne was not only a handsome woman, of a sound and affectionate character, but had a touch of poetic genius. She followed with warm interest and sympathy Goethe’s progress in the composition of the poems of the “Divan.” Some of them were addressed to her, and she responded with original verses, of which Goethe thought so highly that he interwove them with his own work. Goethe’s relations to Wilhelmine Herzlieb and Marianne Willemer were much the same as Dr. Johnson’s relations to Frances Burney and Mrs. Thrale. Both women interested him, appealed to his imagination, and liked him as heartily as he liked them; and, as a poet and a German, he could give warm expression to his regard for them without running the slightest risk of being misunderstood by either. When he sent to Frau Willemer the exquisite little lyric, “Nicht Gelegenheit macht Diebe,” and she, as Suleika, replied with the equally beautiful poem, “Hochbeglückt in deiner Liebe,” they would have been astonished and dismayed had any one been stupid enough to suppose that, so far as their relations to one another were concerned, either set of verses represented more than a light and delicate play of fancy.