Among the artists who bore along to immortality a number of women lost in love is the genius of Germany, the great poet, Goethe! Goethe — or "the flashing gleam that joins eternity past to eternity to come in the moment of artistic creation; or say, human thought itself, admitting no division and no partition!"

Goethe understood, as no other understands, that love alone is the law of morals, and that there is no law besides it — for all the bohemianism in the nature of this emotion, and its preference of chaos over every order. And here is one story of this genius at the hour his heart beat its first beat.

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Goethe was fourteen years old at the time. The whisper of womanhood had not yet been poured into his soul to course through his being as song and poetry, that he might understand what makes the sun blaze with heat, what stirs the wave, what wakes the moan in the brook and the dream in the red rose!

Goethe says of that period, in effect:

"The sight of the French actresses taking off their costumes in the recesses of the theater aroused in me no strange feeling at that time; I thought the scene purely ordinary."

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Then a faint fragrance drifted to his senses... With it he looked out upon the first of spring, and his heart beat its first beat.

That fragrance was the breath of a girl in the dawn of her years!

But who could she be, this girl who wakened in his heart a love at once boyish and deep — a love that troubled his soul and was nonetheless his abiding happiness in his boyhood, and the most beautiful thing he possessed on earth?!

The name "Gretchen" echoes forever in the immortal masterpiece "Faust." And despite the composite quality we find in the personages of that great book, which Goethe nourishes with the images of the many women he loved in his past, there is nothing to deny the complete likeness between the heroine of the greatest of dramas and the gentle girl of Frankfurt who inspired our poet's first emotion!

By chance, at fourteen, Goethe found himself enrolled in a commercial-industrial club gathering a crowd of the rich young men of Frankfurt. With these, only chance had joined Goethe, as we said. They were ordinary, empty people who had set up this club of theirs for certain commercial interests — and he was who he was!!

Among them was a young man well pleased with himself despite his small portion of intelligence. And when he became attached to a girl of ravishing beauty among the girls of Frankfurt, his companions chose to toy with his passion and "amuse themselves at his expense": they asked Goethe to compose some verses of love poetry and attribute them to this girl, singing the praises of her illustrious "beloved"!! He did. And no sooner had our friend received these verses, in which Goethe conveyed to him the girl's "feelings" toward him... than he grew still more vain and self-admiring. But being short of mind and barren of feeling, how was he to answer these verses in kind? Goethe stepped in... and announced that he was at his "service..." And behold, the same emotion that gave life to the fair one's verses gave life also to the "lover's" reply — for Goethe's genius is hindered by no difference of the sexes!

In the course of these pleasantries, Goethe made the acquaintance of the being who would turn him from jest to earnest... Woman had entered his life.

He says in one of his memoirs:

"The table was laid, clean and neat, and on it were set some bottles of wine. We sat down to it, I and my companions, with no need of anyone to serve us. But no sooner had the wine run out than one of us called