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.
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