Even before his friendship with Frau von Stein, at the time of his engagement to Lili Schoenemann, Goethe experienced a spiritual love for a girl he had never seen.  He calls Countess Auguste Stolberg “his angel,” “his only, only maiden,” “his golden child,” and says:  “I have an intuition that you will save me from great tribulation, and that no other being on earth could do it.”  These letters also contain the significant passage:  “Miserable fate which has denied me a happy mean.”  And touching the love of his youth, Lotte, Goethe wrote to Kestner:  “I really had no idea that all that was in her, for I always loved her far too much to observe her.”

The Princess in “Tasso” and “Iphigenia” who delivers Orestes from unrest and insanity, are modelled on Charlotte.  Tasso is unmistakably a fantastic woman-worshipper, a fact of which Leonore is fully aware: 

     Now he exalts her to the starry heavens,
     In radiant glory, and before that form
     Bows down like angels in the realms above. 
     Then, stealing after her, through silent fields,
     He garlands in his wreath each beauteous flower.

He loves not us—­forgive me what I say—­
His lov’d ideal from the spheres he brings
And does invest it with the name we bear. 
He has relinquished passion’s fickle sway,
He clings no longer with delusion sweet
To outward form and beauty to atone
For brief excitement by disgust and hate.[4]

And Tasso says: 

                                  My very knees
     Trembled beneath me and my spirit’s strength
     Was all required to hold myself erect,
     And curb the strong desire to throw myself
     Prostrate before her.  Scarcely could I quell
     The giddy rapture.

The significant avowal addressed by Dante to Beatrice:  “Into a free man thou transform’st a slave,” the seal of all great spiritual love, was repeated by Goethe in his letters to Charlotte, and is again repeated in Tasso: 

     Over my spirit’s depths there comes a change;
     Relieved from dark perplexity I feel,
     Free as a god, and all I owe to you.

Very interesting is also a remark which Goethe made to Eckermann:  “Woman is a silver vessel in which we men lay golden apples.  I did not deduce my idea of woman from reality, but I was born with it, or I conceived it—­God knows how.”  These notable words, deliberately pronounced, reveal Goethe’s feeling very clearly; he knows that there is a little self-deception in his attitude towards woman, but he consciously and lovingly clings to it.  His pronouncements are not contradictions; it is natural, almost essential, that in the soul of the highly-gifted and highly-developed representative of a mature civilisation the whole wealth of human emotions should be revivified.  He possesses all psychical qualities—­at least potentially—­and one element after the other regains life and becomes productive.  We shall see this with startling clearness when we come to examine the emotional life of Richard Wagner.  The intimate connection between the individual and the entire evolutionary process of the race will then become evident.