her.  These had given the poet the purest pleasure, and he intended making use of them for his Autobiography.[8] But, on the other hand, as soon as Bettina risked independent judgments on his creations, as in the case of the Elective Affinities (1809), her inadequacy and her presumption in claiming for herself the role of a better Ottilie were both painfully apparent.  Her attitude toward the adored object was a combination of meekness and pretension, the latter predominating as time went on.  “It was sung at my cradle, that I must love a star that should always remain apart.  But thou [Goethe] hast sung me a cradle song, and to that song, which lulls me into a dream on the fate of my days, I must listen to the end of my days.”  To this humility succeeded the self-deception of the so-called later Diary.  Under date of March 22, 1832, Bettina relates that Goethe, at their last interview in the early days, had called her his Muse.  Hence, on learning of his death, she reproached herself for ever having left him—­“the tree of whose fame, with its eternally budding shoots, had been committed to my care.  Alas for the false world, which separated us, and led me, poor blind child, away from my master!” Margaret Fuller[9] called Goethe “my parent.”  But how sharp is the contrast between her tone of reverent affection and the umbrageous jealousy of Bettina!

And Goethe?  While the poet safeguarded his fatherly relation to Bettina, up to the break in 1811, in a hundred ways, we find him already, in 1807, inclosing in a letter to his mother the text of Sonnet I., which had been inspired, in the first instance, by his friendship with Minna Herzlieb.  Bettina, left to draw her own conclusions, at once identified herself with “Oreas” in the sonnet, and reproached herself for having plunged, like a mountain avalanche, into the broad, full current of the poet’s life.  From the letter of September 17th it is plain that Bettina indulged, in all seriousness, the fanciful notion that her inspiration was, in a sense, necessary to Goethe’s fame.  In her fond, mystical interpretation of the sonnets, her heart seems to her the fruitful furrow, the earth-womb, in which Goethe’s songs are sown, and out of which, accompanied by birth-pangs for her, they are destined to soar aloft as heavenly poems.  She closes with a partial application to herself of the Biblical text (Luke 1. 40):  “Blessed art thou among women.”

Goethe’s detractors, particularly among the literary school called Young Germany, were fond of repeating the insinuation of Fanny Tarnow (1835), that the poet prized in Bettina only her capacity for idolizing him.  But Goethe’s attitude toward the “Child” was far removed from that of poet-pasha, and Bettina had nothing of the vacuous odalisque in her composition.  G. von Loeper has well said of her composite traits:  “The tender radiance of first youth hovers over her descriptions; but, while one is beholding, Bettina suddenly changes