Heine indeed fathomed the secrets of Love much more deeply than Goethe. Whereas Heine sang of Love in every major and minor key, Goethe appears to have emphasised chiefly its transitoriness. “Love, as Goethe knows it,” says Professor Seeley, “is very tender, and has a lyric note as fresh as that of a song-bird. In his _Autobiography_ one love-passage succeeds another, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each case he was to blame is a matter of controversy. But he seems to betray a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental sultan. ‘I was in that agreeable phase,’ he writes, ‘when a new passion had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.’ About Frederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating, bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the deepest impressions and receive new ones; and he never looks back.... Goethe was a man of the old _régime_.... Had he entered into the reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate women.... He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the status of women (‘woman’s fate is pitiable’), and how narrowly confined was their happiness (wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück) ... but he was not a reformer of institutions.” A reformer of institutions, however, has apparently just arisen in Berlin. For we read that at a private female seminary the girls received the following subject for an essay: “There is from the Ideas of Plato, the atoms of Democritus, the Substance of Spinoza, the monads of Leibnitz, and from the subjective mental forms of Kant, the proof to bring, that the philosophy it never neglected has the to-be-calculated results of their hypotheses with their into-perception-falling effects to compare.” Such subjects, so elegantly expressed, are no doubt eminently calculated to bring out the latent possibilities of feminine feeling and culture.