Perhaps even more profound was the storm aroused in Goethe's soul somewhat later by his love for Lili Schönemann, who inspired many of his most beautiful songs and reminiscences. The daughter of a rich Frankfort banker, highly educated by her French mother, young and very beautiful, blond and graceful, in the enjoyment of all the social advantages of her position, she keenly aroused Goethe's emotions, while she also was deeply stirred to see that extraordinary man at her feet. She succeeded absolutely: Goethe became hers with life and soul, while, at the same time, he enjoyed with young Countess Auguste von Stolberg, sister of the two poets, a deep romantic friendship which survived all the storms of his eventful life. He never saw the countess, whom he nevertheless addresses familiarly as "Gustchen" and "thou." His correspondence with her sheds a wondrous light on his soul, especially with reference to his love for Lili. Lili tried to win him, now paining him by jealousy, now soothing him by love. At last a formal betrothal was arranged, which was but the beginning of the end. He tried "whether he could live without Lili," and went on a journey to Switzerland with Count Stolberg. But he never forgot her. In a letter to Gustchen he calls her "the maiden who makes me unhappy without any fault of hers, she with the soul of an angel whose serene days I sadden!" Lili Schonemann became later the wife of the Alsatian Baron von Turckheim, with whom she lived in happy marriage till her death in 1817. She confessed to her daughter as the true reason of her broken betrothal to Goethe the revelation made to her by her mother of Goethe's former relation to Friederike Brion and of his conduct toward her. Lili, though pure and true to her husband, never forgot Goethe; while the latter, in his age, confessed to Eckermann that "he had loved her deeply as no one before or afterward." Lili's biography, _Lili's Portrait_, written by her grandson, Count Turckheim, is an important chapter in the history of a cultured, high-minded, energetic, and exquisite womanly character, loved and lost by the poet-prince of Germany. It is not accidental that Goethe, distracted by the loss and not knowing where to turn, plunged into and translated just at that time Solomon's Song of Songs, which he described in a letter to his friend Merck as "the most glorious collection of songs of love God ever created." It is also almost providential that he received, even at that period of regret and despair, the renewed invitation of Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar, who had recently ascended the throne of his fathers, and who was destined to become the greatest Mæcenas of the century and, as it were, the sponsor of Germany's greatest intellectual bloom, to establish himself at Weimar. There he arrived on November 7, 1775, at the age of twenty-six, received with universal rejoicing and enthusiasm. "New love, new life," arises for him in Weimar, and with his new love and new life a new era