As women at all times affected the hearts and souls of the great poets, there is not one who was not moulded by womanly affections, so they in turn were remoulded by the respective lovers. This is proved by the entire literature of the period. The great ballad poet Burger, scorning the tenets of morality, leads a dissolute life; and this life is reflected even in his best work. He marries Dorette Leonhardt, while he already loves her younger sister Molly, and his passion for the latter grows more impetuous during his married life. As Molly returns his criminal love, the lawful wife resigns herself to a relation which destroys the lives of all three. After having lost both his wives in rapid succession, he commits the error of marrying a third wife, Elise Hahn, who, carried away by his poetry, offers herself to Burger, whom she has never seen, and who romantically accepts her hand. But "the delusion was short, repentance was long." Elise's fickleness, frivolity, and manifest infidelity soon brought about a divorce. Broken in heart and spirit, the great poet, whose life had been wrecked by "the eternal feminine," which, instead of uplifting him, dragged him into the mire, died, solitary, wretched, and reduced to poverty and self-contempt. His poetry bears the traces of his ruined life. On the other hand, the simple, virtuous and idyllic, pastoral life in Germany is charmingly portrayed in Voss's _Luise_, and is illuminated by Goethe's poetic genius in _Hermann and Dorothea_. Goethe, however, not only depicted idyllic life in poetry, but actually lived it in his student days in Strassburg with Friederike Brion, the pastor's daughter, of Sessenheim. The art of painting has immortalized in numberless pictures the charming idyllic forms of the lovely shepherdesses, the Luises, the Mariannes. Miller's Siegwart, a _Cloister Story_, is one of the many picture books of the feminine soul of that complex period of simplicity and enlightenment. Chodowiecki, the great painter, is perhaps the best delineator of those typical figures of German womanhood.