The men and women of romanticism formed a group bound together only by spiritual relationship, in which the women aspired to the culture of the men and shared their intellectual interests, while the men promoted the women’s “desire for men’s culture, art, knowledge, and distinction” (_Geluste nach der Männer Bildung, Kunst, Weisheit und Ehre._—Schleiermacher). Now, young people studying in different fields exert a mutual humanising influence and thereby learn to know one another from the side of intelligence as well as from that of character and disposition. Thus are dispelled certain illusions and conceptions almost forced upon them through which both sexes in the years of adolescence once regarded each other. Men as well as women obtain a finer criterion for the conception of “womanliness” and of “manliness”; both discover the innumerable shadings which these conceptions conceal; both recognise that the sexes can meet not only upon the erotic plane, but upon a plane that is universally human; finally, both learn that the more perfect and complete human beings they become, the more they have to thank one another for it. Comprehension in erotic relations is most difficult because, there, women are far in advance of men. Woman’s ideal of love, however, is becoming more and more the ideal of young men. Young girls, on their side, are beginning to understand better the sexual nature of men. The whole world in which man received his culture, won his victories, suffered his defeats, is no longer _terra incognita_ to women; they have lost the blind reverence or the blind hostility with which they formerly regarded the doings and dealings of men. Men, on the other hand, are learning that the domestic labours for the comfort of the family, which they have thus far regarded as the sole duty of woman, cannot engross her whole soul, that domesticity leaves many wishes unfulfilled. So both sexes have begun, each on its own side, to build a bridge across the chasm which law and custom had dug between them. The young still ponder over the enigmatical antitheses in their natures, yet they find they have very much that is human in common with one another. In comradeship, however, that “chivalry” vanishes, which among other things consisted in the ideal that the young men had always to bear all the burdens and duties. Now as a rule, the girl carries her own knapsack on excursions and pays her share of the expenses. But if she really needs help, the youth is quite as ready as before to grant it to her, just as she also on her part is ready to assist according to her strength: honest friendship has replaced rapturous chivalry. This friendly comradeship often satisfies the young man’s need of feminine kindness and enjoyment in those dangerous years when, as a young man said, “Three fourths of the life of a youth, conscious and unconscious, is sex life.” And nothing can more effectually prevent him from degrading himself than