sensibility, or has created more angelic types under feminine features, or has sung upon the lyre more enthusiastically and delicately of these companions of our existence.

The ideal of Schiller has in it nothing fantastic, and is not the fruit of an imagination warmed by the enjoyment of the artist. Notwithstanding his love of perfect beauty he would not, like our romancists, have established the theory of art for the sake of art, exalting the pride of talent with a superb indifference to ideas.

"I

A complete man, love for man underlies all that he does and wishes. His sensibility and emotions are not to him, as with Goethe, merely an object for the artist's observation; they are associated with his poetic mission, and inspire it even. have had little enjoyment in life," he writes, while yet young, "but (and it is of this I am most proud) that little I owe to my heart." And, further on, "O, my soul has need of a new aliment, of better men, of friendship, of attachment, of love." His sociability had its roots in the depths of his nature. What the youth promised the man was, throughout his career, in his social relations and his works. In reading his poetry we feel the thrill of emotion to which Schiller himself yields; he loves all humanity, and would ennoble it to make it happy; his nature being highly sympathetic he always awakens sympathy.

To cite as an example only one of his most popular poems, the Song of the Bell, upon how many terrestrial interests does the poet from the height at which he hovers lovingly look down! He passes in review all the phases of human destiny, its joys and its griefs; he has songs for the fireside and for the country. Ask men of whatever condition and situation of life, and they will all have received words of consolation and encouragement from the golden mouth of the poet. And in his ode to Joy, a hymn the wings of which carry him to the foot of the throne where

Beyond the heavens the God of Heaven resides,"

how he is saddened by the miseries of humanity! how he feels for its sufferings!

His idealism is, then, combined with realism in just proportions. He repels only base affections and ignoble intentions. From the elevation of his genius he constantly seeks the virtue

on earth, to encourage it; fallen humanity, to raise it; grief, to pour forth its plaint; domestic happiness, to embellish it.

His private life affords a pleasing commentary on his writings, assisting the just valuation of his spirit. Friendship was one of his liveliest enjoyments. IIis unreserve in the society of his friends was limited only by decorum. The gayety which animated him, his confiding disposition, the heart-warmth of his friendship, are the charm of his correspondence, espe cially of his letters to Körner. Nothing can be more charming than the interchange of sentiment found in the letters of Schiller and his family. His father, who had been a military man, and was now chief inspector of the gardens of the Duke of Würtemberg, does not comprehend all the works of the son, but he thinks them good, and enjoys the glory of his child for nearly twenty years; yet in the blaze of that glory the paternal dignity is not lost. From the tenderness and delicacy of his mother, you gather that Schiller, like many another poet, received from the maternal mind one of the richest portions of his heritage. The letters of the brothers are also full of interest. But Schiller should have been seen in the privacy of his own home. All the sweetness he ascribes to woman's heart his own lavished on his wife. With his children he was again a child; his two daughters would climb upon his knees to his embraces; the playmate of his sons, he enjoyed their most childish sports.

There is nothing in the history of German literature more interesting than the slowly developed friendship of Schiller and Goethe. Each year drew the bond closer. Rivals in glory without a shadow of jealousy, they consulted each other, contributed to each other's success, and rejoiced at that success together: theirs was a generous alliance of two powerful minds to elevate their nation by the love of noble poetry. Thanks to the diversity of their talents, each was the complement of the other. If they had not shone together the splendor of the most beautiful age of literature would have been somewhat dimmed. Genius possesses no means of swaying men more powerful than dramatic poetry. Schiller's career was especially that of a dramatic author; his popularity was due to his lyric poems

and tragedies.

The impatience of his poetic ardor to express itself and act

upon others impelled him to the theater while quite young. Having been admitted in 1773, by Duke Charles of Würtemberg, to the military academy established and afterward enlarged by him to a sort of university, under the name of Karl's Schule, Schiller there first studied law, but forsook it for medicine when that department was opened. The severe discipline of this school did not allow freedom of action nor the full play of the intellect. But tyranny helps the strong. Schiller took refuge in the world of ideas and the study of literature. At the age of eighteen (in 1777) he composed the Robbers, and read it in secret to his fellow-students. It was an explosion of his repressed feelings and seething imagination many of its allusions recall the yoke under which his spirit chafed. The drama was printed after he had expunged, by the advice of friends, the most eccentric passages. The public was delighted: in spite of the imperfections of the work it recognized the seal of genius in the vigor and originality of its ideas and language. It had the boldness of thought and warmth of sentiment which then fired spirits on both sides of the Rhine, and were to flame forth in the French revolution. The Baron of Dalberg, director of the theater of Mannheim, which stood in the first rank as having the great actor and dramatic poet Iffland, easily obtained a few emendations from Schiller, and put his piece upon the stage in 1782. The young poet was at that time attached to the army as a surgeon. In his anxiety to witness his own play, he left Stuttgard without permission, to be present at the two first representations. Upon his return he was put under a fortnight's arrest for this infringement of discipline. The Duke, displeased with the tendency of the drama, by an edict forbade the author's publishing anything that had not reference to medicine. Schiller quitted Stuttgard secretly, and repaired under an assumed name to Franconia, near Meiningen, to the estate of Madame Wolzogen, whose sons had been his fellow-pupils. He remained there nearly a year, finished Fiesco and composed Love and Intrigue. With these dramas he went to Mannheim and entered upon an engagement to write for that theater. two new pieces established the great reputation the Robbers · had gained him. The three together form the first period of his career.

His

His idea of art having been refined and expanded during the prosecution of these labors, Schiller in 1784 undertook the publication of a journal, Thalia, intended for the improvement of the theater, and composed Don Carlos. This was a tragedy, and the first successful attempt to introduce upon the German stage the iambic verse of the Greek tragedy. Besides the pathos of its passion and the interest of its characters, the author unfolds in it the principles of the French philosophy of the eighteenth century on the rights of the people and tolerThe work lacks unity of plan and interest; begins in one system and continues in another; but in spite of these and other faults, which the poet himself conscientiously points out in his letters on Don Carlos, Schiller, in producing it, endowed Germany with pathetic, eloquent, ideal and historical, powerful and poetic tragedy. This was in 1792.

ance.

Don Carlos forms the transition from the first dramatic period of Schiller to that of his maturity. While writing it, his genius was especially ripened by the study of history. He made thorough researches for it into the times and reign of Philip II. The History of the Revolt of the Netherlands was. the direct result of this study. This excellent work was well received by all classes, and gained the author, with the aid of Goethe, the chair of history at the University of Jena. He entered upon his duties at this seat of learning in May, 1789. Two years after appeared the History of the Thirty Years' War; it had a similar origin to the composition of Wallenstein, and its success was not less brilliant. The genius of the poet in the service of truth rendered Schiller's histories popular, and he was followed by an improved class of historians.

When the tragedy of Wallenstein appeared (in 1798 and '99) its truthful and poetic painting of the condition and customs of Germany in the first part of the seventeenth century, its life-like hero, whose worldly ambition seeks support in the supernatural, the noble and the corrupt characters surrounding him, delighted the spectators, awakened universal enthusiasm, and naturalized grand and ideal tragedy in Germany. Wallenstein was not only a new palm for the brow of the poet, but the triumph of elevated poetry over the low grade of realism that under Kotzebue and others then prevailed at the theater.

Germany acknowledged her great tragic poet. Schiller fixed his residence at Wiemar.

The poet, if worthy of the name, treats history as he does nature, with a respectful liberty, making choice of what he will reproduce. Schiller's idealization was not transformation, nor always embellishment, but the presentation of each thing and character in its supreme idea, and the showing, in the combination of these realities, of the reign of tragic destiny in its terror. He has effected this in part in his Mary Stuart. If he painted her more beautiful than reality, it was because he had chosen her for his heroine and must make her interest

ing by lessening her perversity. The other characters are not overdrawn; their vices represent the ideas and passions that divided England.

After Mary Stuart, the poet chose another woman for the heroine of a tragedy; Joan of Arc. This was a subject different to treat at the close of the eighteenth century. The best society and literature were impregnated with the sneering philosophy of the French, and the courts, not excepting the enlightened court of Weimar, knew the Maid of Orleans only by Voltaire's poem.

Perhaps the coarse jests of Voltaire caused Schiller to place Joan of Arc in a higher sphere than he would do now. If he had written his drama after the publication of the documents on the life of Joan and had known the depositions of cotemporary witnesses, he would have discarded all supernatural marvel and kept to that of history. The destiny that in his tragedy hovers over Joan of Arc, whether it conducts her miraculously to victory, or lets her fall to the condition of simple woman, is impressed with sadness and grandeur; but we think it less touching than the real facts. Yet history lent brilliancy to this drama; the pictures of combats, of the misery of France, of domestic life, and of devotion in the field, are the most brilliant parts of this poem. Schiller had never before so enchanted the imagination.

In the Bride of Messina, the poet, already so varied, almost rivals Greek tragedy in pathos and the terror of fatalism. He never, perhaps, came nearer to it in perfection of composition.

Many persons regard William Tell as Schiller's dramatic