There is a good deal of the _Sensitiva-amorosa_ nature about Keller, though it is still in the bud, and a comparatively green bud too. It is there nevertheless, and it shows itself in _Green Henry_, in _The Governor of Greifensee_, and in other places besides. His longing for love goes forth in search of an object, but his sensitive personality holds him back, afraid lest he should be drawn into an unequal union and made to suffer its painful and destructive results. He is not formed out of the coarse material which recognises itself as the master of the woman, he knows that in love and through loving the woman becomes the mistress of the master, and he shrinks from a stupid, small-minded, unworthy mistress. This is why his novels are full of incessant meetings and partings, and while the parting in _Green Henry_ takes place with all the melancholy natural to youth, it becomes quite a cheerful event in the _Governor of Greifensee_, and the lovers separate in one of those half sad, half humorous moods when we congratulate ourselves on having escaped a serious danger. He never pictures a woman more alive, or with a keener observation accompanied by more characteristic details, than when he describes her in just such a humorous situation as this. At no other time does he describe so vividly the intellectual poverty, the emptiness of woman--that emptiness which is so peculiarly feminine, although the exact opposite is the popular opinion, and which proves the absence of any really deep, personal feeling. Woman falls in love with externals, with a pair of large, glowering eyes, a loud voice, an actor, or a clergyman like the earnest Aglaya, and she leaves off loving as soon as she is wooed by a person with more individuality than herself, as, for example, in _The Sensitive Hedge-Sparrow_. Or when it becomes apparent that the man does not come of a sufficiently wealthy and presentable family, for example: _Salome_. Or when, like Leu, she is a refined, truly amiable and intelligent woman, who is led astray by a dubious theory about heredity, thereby forfeiting her own and her lover’s happiness.