was left sorrowful and solitary in sunny Kent, and in the sad old hall of Greyscote.

And the young Countess? Fair and stately in her young matronhood-a lady, noble, loved, and gracious, she was yet held to be something cold and reserved. Fine observers noted that some string in the harp of life seemed jarred. Her beauty grew, but with it grew her seeming coldness. Often-oftener perhaps than the Earl, had he known of it, might have liked -she took from a sacred drawer a ring, a lock of hair, one or two letters, and sat with them and her heart in solitude. As the years stole on, and children grew around her, she visited that drawer more rarely, but visited it ever on one day in every year-the day on which her mind was most strongly stirred by that long fidelity of memory to a lost love which forms the sad secret underlying many a married woman's life. She lived to be an old woman, and long time a widow, dying in 1648, the year of the execution of Charles I. In her last days she bade her granddaughter bring to her once more the relics of her love of long ago; and the white-haired grandmother told the wondering girl something of that passage of her life so deeply stamped with the image of poor Herbert Grey. Through a long life of duties worthily discharged, of many quiet joys, and of domestic calm, the woman's heart, torn asunder in girlhood from her one true love, had clung in secret to the tender memory of the love of her romance and to the passion of her youth.

And thus, in that great reign of the Reformationa time in which in England, arts and arms, literature and adventure, and all noble public life, flowered into brilliant splendour-young Herbert Grey fell in the

noble struggle, and died before he had raised himself by gallant service to success and fame.

When, by accident, the slight surviving suggestions and hints of the loves and lives of Herbert and of Lettice came to my knowledge, I was touched with the sad issue of their passion, and charmed with the glimpse afforded into typical life of the far great days of Elizabeth. But Herbert's chief interest for me consisted in the slight record which his letters left of his intercourse with Shakspeare, and in the fact that he happened to be present at the first representation of "Hamlet." This it was which determined me to attempt to compose from the few scattered bones a living whole-which induced me to piece out the slight fragments of suggestive evidence into form and shape. The greatest men are always the products of the greatest days. Great, indeed, then, must have been those Elizabethan times which could flower into Shakspeare!

Slight and faint as my sketch necessarily is-feeble and incomplete as is my effort to give a local habitation and a name to beings who lived and felt so long ago, and who have left so small and shadowy a trace of their ways and histories-there is yet allusion, though brief and hurried, in Herbert's letters to the personality of the poet, whom he saw with living eyes, and to the performance which he actually witnessed of "Hamlet." The evidence must be read by the light of imagination; but it seemed to me a plain duty to communicate to Englishmen the glimpse which chance afforded to me, through Herbert Grey, of our own Shakspeare.

THE LOVES OF GOETHE. ·

A

"Oftmals hab' ich geirrt, und habe mich wieder gefunden,
Aber glücklicher nie."-GOETHE.

"To judge the man, observe him well in love.”—Old Play.

FEW years ago a Goethe-Ausstellung was held in

Berlin. By good fortune, I chanced to be in the city of Frederick when this interesting collection of memorabilia connected with the great poet was exhibited. Such an exhibition attracted not only the lovers of Goethe, but all who had seen or known the greatest German. Goethe, dying in 1832, has already receded so far back into history, that those who have spoken with him are few, and are men no longer young. Thackeray, for instance, whom we have seen, in his youth (in 1831), saw Goethe. I had the happiness of being introduced to one who had known the poet well, and had enjoyed his friendship during the last ten years of Goethe's life. From this living biographer I learned viva voce, many details of Goethe's later life, and many traits of his character.

The exhibition contained manuscripts of Goethe's writings, various editions of his works, letters from and to him, and the whole of that flood of literature excited by Werther. There was the note in which Jerusalem borrowed the pistols of Kestner, and there, too, was the fatal weapon with which the morbid model for Werther committed suicide.

One feature in this exhibition possessed for me a special attraction. Round the walls hung all the existing obtainable portraits of the women with whom the great poet, during his long life, had had Verhältnisse. It was a gallery of the poet's loves. The pictures differed considerably in excellence and value. Some were very inferior; others had that individuality which stamps a true portrait, and that vraisemblance which enables you to decide that the portrait of a person never seen is a likeness. Some were good as works of art; some left very much to be desired. There was the fragile delicate grace of Lili; there the tender, true-hearted beauty of Frederika; there the high-bred repose of Charlotte von Stein; there the laughter-brimming eyes of Frederika Oeser. Corona Schröter looked from the wall with the assured eyes of an actress who had gazed on audiences subjected to her spell. The sprightly animalism and soft voluptuousness of Christiane Vulpius lived again upon the canvas, and round the room glittered eyes which had looked love upon Goethe.

Lili and Madame von Stein were strikingly distinct, in their types of charm and of elegance, from all the rest. Through most of the others there seemed, to my fancy, to run variations of one type of woman. They were all exquisitely feminine, with softly-rounded forms and a certain refined, sensuous womanhood, sometimes tender, sometimes sportive, always animated. Not one was grand or tragic. Nothing of the terrific in woman was there. No aquiline noses, no high cheekbones, no stony eyes, no gaunt or colossal figures.

There is not a touch of the heroic in any one of them; they are all more or less domestic and familiar.

I fancy that the creator of Imogen would have loved a trace of princess that should not lessen womanhood.

There was no strain of the lofty or majestic or imposing; all were essentially women, and full of feminine deliciousness; all were more or less exquisitely lovable and attractive-instinct with the charm of sex, and full of that magnet of femininity which is so magical in its operation on man.

I looked, I think, longer upon these portraits than upon any other of the many objects in the Ausstellung, and nothing there had for me a greater charm. The recollection of those portraits of the women that Goethe loved, of the women that loved him, all now dead, has, in fact, suggested the present essay.

But how can I compress any sketch of these-any dream of these fair women-into the compass of a mere article? Sitting one day with some friends in the studio of my friend, Dick Tinto, Dick was eloquent on the subject of a great picture which he had just conceived and was about to execute. As he spoke, the artist's instinctive hand was tracing out the roughest suggestion of his conception on a small piece of canvas that happened to be lying about. "How will you make anything of such a subject on such a bit of canvas?" asked one present. "Don't know," replied Dick, working rapidly and deftly on, "but I can try to give you some idea of what I mean." And he did; despite the limits of his material, the painter succeeded in giving a suggestive idea, rough but vivid, of his subject, and I can only hope to give on this small piece of canvas the roughest sketchy suggestion of what my pictures might be and should be. May I be as successful as was Dick Tinto!

Goethe had many loves. And why? The answer