broken limbs; it shall rule the hearts and works of men in freedom and gladness, and supersede the lifeless phantoms of fictitious virtues.”  Schleiermacher also voiced the idea of the synthesis:  “And why should we be arrested in this struggle (i.e., between love as the flower of sensuousness and the intellectual mystical component of love), when in all domains we are striving to bring the ideas, born by the new development of humanity, into harmony with the result of the work of past ages?” His Confidential Letters on Schlegel’s Lucinda have made the Protestant pastor Schleiermacher the philosopher of the third stage of eroticism, as the chaplain Andreas was the theorist of the second.  The third stage gained its first footing amongst the German romanticists.  Women were largely instrumental in achieving its victory.  I will not go into detail but will confine myself to mentioning in passing the names of Jean Paul, Henrietta Herz, Brentano, Sophy Mereau, Dorothy Vest, Schelling, Friedrich Gentz.  W. von Humboldt records a conversation which he had in the year of the Revolution with Schiller.  The latter unhesitatingly professed his faith in the unity of love.  “It (the blending of love and sensuality) is always possible and always there.”  But Humboldt was diffident, unable fully to grasp the new conception.  “I said that it would sever the most beautiful, most delicate relationships, that it was too heterogeneous to admit of coherence; but my principal argument was that in the majority of cases it was out of the question....”

There is a document from the year 1779 which contains in its entirety the modern conception of harmonious love, together with its ecstatic apotheosis, the love-death, a document which puts the later theorising romanticists and Lucinda completely in the shade.  I am referring to the only one of Gottfried August Buerger’s letters to Molly, which has been preserved.  It contains the following passages:  “I cannot describe to you in words how ardently I embrace you in the spirit.  There is in me such a tumult of life that frequently after an outburst my spirit and soul are left in such weariness that I seem to be on the point of death.  Every brief calm begets more violent storms.  Often in the black darkness of a stormy, rainy midnight, I long to hasten to you, throw myself into your arms, sink with you into the infinite ocean of delight and—­die.  Oh Love! oh Love! what a strange and wonderful power art thou to hold body and soul in such unbreakable bonds!...  I let my imagination roam through the whole world, yea, through all the heavens and the Heaven of heavens, and examine every delight and compare it to you, but by the Eternal God! there is nothing I desire so ardently as to hold you, sweetest and heavenliest of all women, in my arms.  If I could win you by walking round the earth, naked and barefoot, through thorns and thistles, over rocks and snow and ice, and, on the point of death, with the last spark of life, sink into your arms and draw new life and happiness from your loving bosom, I should consider that I bought you for a trifle.”