One's first impression is that these women, Rahel, Bettina, and Charlotte, who all three became famous in the year 1835, have nothing in common. Rahel dies in 1833 at the age of sixty-one, and her real life-work, the first energetic vindication of Goethe's pre-eminence, belongs quite as much to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century. Bettina, who is fourteen years younger, does not come before the public till a year after Rahel's death; she combines the exalted enthusiasm and the unreality of Romanticism with the reforming tendencies of Young Germany. Charlotte's only achievement was to kill herself, a thing which has been done by women times without number, though probably never for the same reason. But when we look a little deeper, we find that they have many traits in common. They are all restless, with the restlessness distinctive of their day, which manifests itself, not in outward hurry and strain, but in strong emotions, not in the nervousness prevalent in our own day, but in perpetual introspection. Then there is the peculiarity that none of them transgress the laws of society, though none of them have any respect for these laws. And there is the wonderful, ideal fidelity which they all display. Rahel is Goethe's, from the first breath she draws as a grown-up woman to her last. Bettina is Goethe's, with such absorbing devotion that the scheme of erecting a colossal monument to him which she advocated in her first published work (a monument which she herself planned and had executed in miniature), becomes in her old age an _idée fixe_. Charlotte so entirely belongs to the man on whom her choice falls when she is sixteen, that she not only lives for him, but dies for him. Another thing they have in common is enthusiasm. Rahel's burns like a steady, sacred flame; Bettina's breaks out in a pyrotechnic display of ideas and visions; Charlotte's manifests itself in the resolute, uncomplaining sacrifice of her life. It is genius that they all worship; they have the enthusiastic German appreciation of poetic genius; their great desire is to do what in them lies to promote its recognition and glorification, or its development and emancipation; to this task they devote their lives, regardless of the worthiness or unworthiness of the object of their choice. Lastly, the thoughts and feelings of all three are remarkably original. These women resemble no other women. Never, to our knowledge, has there been such another reflective emotionalist as Rahel, such another sylph-like enthusiast as Bettina, such another suicide as Charlotte's, a suicide inspired by a lofty though false æsthetic principle.