Though “poor as church mice,” the two women were radiantly happy, and “of a personality so powerful” that they were known as the Platonists. “Their retreat became a kind of court at which all the great ones of their time presented themselves. Wordsworth, DeQuincey, Scott, the Duke of Wellington and Mme. de Genlis were among their guests,”[3] and they had a half century of idyllic happiness before they died, Eleanor in 1829 and Sarah in 1831. The journal which Eleanor Butler kept from 1788 until her death records the placid course of their mutual existence, detailing financial stress lightly borne, small village tensions faced with equanimity, and again and again “a day of sweetly enjoyed retirement.” On the precise nature of the relation between them the journal is naturally reticent. The modern French analyst of all feminine emotions, Colette, devotes better than twenty pages to it in _Ces Plaisirs_, and epitomizes neatly the distinguishing feature of all such attachments. ‘It is not sensuality that ensures the fidelity of two women but a kind of blood kinship.... I have written kinship where I should have said identity. Their close resemblance guarantees similarity in _volupté_. The lover takes courage in her certainty of caressing a body whose secrets she knows, whose preferences her own body has taught her.’[4] If English readers of Eleanor’s journal want to see in a single mention of “our bed” an impure significance, says Colette, then let them. ‘What is purity? Why is it “pure” to stroke a cheek but not a breast? Yes, yes, the breast responds. But what of it, if above it the lover merely dreams? “It is the victim who is almost always responsible in emotional crimes,” says an old magistrate. How one would like to have the journal of Sarah Ponsonby, the younger girl! Eleanor Butler was the practical one, the possessor, the male. Sarah Ponsonby was the _woman_.’[5] *Karoline von Günderode.* During the same years that saw these willing exiles living out their rapturous idyll, a very different life was swept along on the tide of romantic _Sturm und Drang_ in Germany. Karoline von Günderode was still unborn when the Ladies of Llangollen settled in their Welsh elysium, and suicide ended her quarter-century of life two decades before their death. Outside her native land this distinguished young romantic poet is most likely to be remembered through her brief connection with Bettina Brentano von Arnim, sister of the poet Clemens Brentano and the “child” of _Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kind_. The mercurial and precocious Bettina was undoubtedly a very remarkable young person, but scholarly research has proved her published correspondence with Goethe to be largely spurious, and even the superficial reader can detect signs of _post facto_ interpolation in her letter to Goethe’s mother describing Günderode’s death and the two girls’ previous relationship.[1]