SCHILLER.

John Christopher Frederick von Schiller, was born at Marbach, a

small town in the duchy of Wurtemberg, on the 10th day of November,

1759. It will aid the reader in synchronizing the periods of this

great man's life with the corresponding events throughout

Christendom, if we direct his attention to the fact, that

Schiller's birth nearly coincided in point of time with that of

Robert Burns, and that it preceded that of Napoleon by about ten

years.

The position of Schiller is remarkable. In the land of his birth,

by those who undervalue him the most, he is ranked as the second

name in German literature; everywhere else he is ranked as the

first. For us, who are aliens to Germany, Schiller is the

representative of the German intellect in its highest form; and to

him, at all events, whether first or second, it is certainly due,

that the German intellect has become a known power, and a power of

growing magnitude, for the great commonwealth of Christendom.

Luther and Kepler, potent intellects as they were, did not make

themselves known as Germans. The revolutionary vigor of the one,

the starry lustre of the other, blended with the convulsions of

reformation, or with the aurora of ascending science, in too kindly

and genial a tone to call off the attention from the work which

they performed, from the service which they promoted, to the

circumstances of their personal position. Their country, their

birth, their abode, even their separate existence, was merged in

the mighty cause to which they lent their cooperation. And thus at

the beginning of the sixteenth century, thus at the beginning of

the seventeenth, did the Titan sons of Germany defeat their own

private pretensions by the very grandeur of their merits. Their

interest as patriots was lost and confounded in their paramount

interest as cosmopolites. What they did for man and for human

dignity eclipsed what they had designed for Germany. After them

there was a long interlunar period of darkness for the land of the

Rhine and the Danube. The German energy, too spasmodically excited,

suffered a collapse. Throughout the whole of the seventeenth

century, but one vigorous mind arose for permanent effects in

literature. This was Opitz, a poet who deserves even yet to be read

with attention, but who is no more worthy to be classed as the

Dryden, whom his too partial countrymen have styled him, than the

Germany of the Thirty Years' War of taking rank by the side of

civilized and cultured England during the Cromwellian era, or

Klopstock of sitting on the same throne with Milton. Leibnitz was

the one sole potentate in the fields of intellect whom the Germany

of this country produced; and he, like Luther and Kepler, impresses

us rather as a European than as a German mind, partly perhaps from

his having pursued his self-development in foreign lands, partly

from his large circle of foreign connections, but most of all from

his having written chiefly in French or in Latin. Passing onwards

to the eighteenth century, we find, through its earlier half, an

absolute wilderness, unreclaimed and without promise of natural

vegetation, as the barren arena on which the few insipid writers of

Germany paraded. The torpor of academic dulness domineered over the

length and breadth of the land. And as these academic bodies were

universally found harnessed in the equipage of petty courts, it

followed that the lethargies of pedantic dulness were uniformly

deepened by the lethargies of aulic and ceremonial dulness; so

that, if the reader represents to himself the very abstract of

birthday odes, sycophantish dedications, and court sermons, he will

have some adequate idea of the sterility and the mechanical

formality which at that era spread the sleep of death over German

literature. Literature, the very word literature, points the

laughter of scorn to what passed under that name during the period

of Gottsched. That such a man indeed as this Gottsched, equal at

the best to the composition of a Latin grammar or a school

arithmetic, should for a moment have presided over the German

muses, stands out as in itself a brief and significant memorial,

too certain for contradiction, and yet almost too gross for belief,

of the apoplectic sleep under which the mind of central Europe at

that era lay oppressed. The rust of disuse had corroded the very

principles of activity.

And, as if the double night of academic dulness, combined with the

dulness of court inanities, had not been sufficient for the

stifling of all native energies, the feebleness of French models

(and of these moreover naturalized through still feebler

imitations) had become the law and standard for all attempts at

original composition. The darkness of night, it is usually said,

grows deeper as it approaches the dawn; and the very enormity of

that prostration under which the German intellect at this time

groaned, was the most certain pledge to any observing eye of that

intense reaction soon to stir and kindle among the smouldering

activities of this spell-bound people. This re-action, however, was

not abrupt and theatrical. It moved through slow stages and by

equable gradations. It might be said to commence from the middle of

the eighteenth century, that is, about nine years before the birth

of Schiller; but a progress of forty years had not carried it so

far towards its meridian altitude, as that the sympathetic shock

from the French Revolution was by one fraction more rude and

shattering than the public torpor still demanded. There is a

memorable correspondency throughout all members of Protestant

Christendom in whatsoever relates to literature and intellectual

advance. However imperfect the organization which binds them

together, it was sufficient even in these elder times to transmit

reciprocally from one to every other, so much of that illumination

which could be gathered into books, that no Christian state could

be much in advance of another, supposing that Popery opposed no

barriers to free communication, unless only in those points which

depended upon local gifts of nature, upon the genius of a

particular people, or upon the excellence of its institutions.

These advantages were incommunicable, let the freedom of

intercourse have been what it might. England could not send off by

posts or by heralds her iron and coals; she could not send the

indomitable energy of her population; she could not send the

absolute security of property; she could not send the good faith of

her parliaments. These were gifts indigenous to herself, either

through the temperament of her people, or through the original

endowments of her soil. But her condition of moral sentiment, her

high-toned civic elevation, her atmosphere of political feeling and

popular boldness; much of these she could and did transmit, by the

radiation of the press, to the very extremities of the German

empire. Not only were our books translated, but it is notorious to

those acquainted with German novels, or other pictures of German

society, that as early as the Seven Years' War, (1756-1763,) in

fact, from the very era when Cave and Dr. Johnson first made the

parliamentary debates accessible to the English themselves, most of

the German journals repeated, and sent forward as by telegraph,

these senatorial displays to every village throughout Germany. From

the polar latitudes to the Mediterranean, from the mouths of the

Rhine to the Euxine, there was no other exhibition of free

deliberative eloquence in any popular assembly. And the

_Luise_ of Voss alone, a metrical idyl not less valued for its

truth of portraiture than our own Vicar of Wakefield, will show,

that the most sequestered clergyman of a rural parish did not think

his breakfast equipage complete without the latest report from the

great senate that sat in London. Hence we need not be astonished

that German and English literature were found by the French

Revolution in pretty nearly the same condition of semi-vigilance

and imperfect animation. That mighty event reached us both, reached

us all, we may say, (speaking of Protestant states,) at the same

moment, by the same tremendous galvanism. The snake, the

intellectual snake, that lay in ambush among all nations, roused

itself, sloughed itself, renewed its youth, in all of them at the

same period. A new world opened upon us all; new revolutions of

thought arose; new and nobler activities were born; "and other

palms were won."

But by and through Schiller it was, as its main organ, that this

great revolutionary impulse expressed itself. Already, as we have

said, not less than forty years before the earthquake by which

France exploded and projected the scoria of her huge crater over

all Christian lands, a stirring had commenced among the dry bones

of intellectual Germany; and symptoms arose that the breath of life

would soon disturb, by nobler agitations than by petty personal

quarrels, the deathlike repose even of the German universities.

Precisely in those bodies, however, it was, in those as connected

with tyrannical governments, each academic body being shackled to

its own petty centre of local despotism, that the old spells

remained unlinked; and to them, equally remarkable as firm trustees

of truth, and as obstinate depositories of darkness or of

superannuated prejudice, we must ascribe the slowness of the German

movement on the path of reascent. Meantime the earliest

torch-bearer to the murky literature of this great land, this

crystallization of political states, was Bodmer. This man had no

demoniac genius, such as the service required; but he had some

taste, and, what was better, he had some sensibility. He lived

among the Alps; and his reading lay among the alpine sublimities of

Milton and Shakspeare. Through his very eyes he imbibed a daily

scorn of Gottsched and his monstrous compound of German coarseness

with French sensual levity. He could not look at his native Alps,

but he saw in them, and their austere grandeurs or their dread

realities, a spiritual reproach to the hollowness and falsehood of

that dull imposture which Gottsched offered by way of substitute

for nature. He was taught by the Alps to crave for something nobler

and deeper. Bodmer, though far below such a function, rose by favor

of circumstances into an apostle or missionary of truth for

Germany. He translated passages of English literature. He

inoculated with his own sympathies the more fervent mind of the

youthful Klopstock, who visited him in Switzerland. And it soon

became evident that Germany was not dead, but sleeping; and once

again, legibly for any eye, the pulses of life began to play freely

through the vast organization of central Europe.

Klopstock, however, though a fervid, a religious, and for that

reason an anti-Gallican mind, was himself an abortion. Such at

least is our own opinion of this poet. He was the child and

creature of enthusiasm, but of enthusiasm not allied with a

masculine intellect, or any organ for that capacious vision and

meditative range which his subjects demanded. He vas essentially

thoughtless, betrays everywhere a most effeminate quality of

sensibility, and is the sport of that pseudo-enthusiasm and

baseless rapture which we see so often allied with the excitement

of strong liquors. In taste, or the sense of proportions and

congruencies, or the harmonious adaptations, he is perhaps the most

defective writer extant.

But if no patriarch of German literature, in the sense of having

shaped the moulds in which it was to flow, in the sense of having

disciplined its taste or excited its rivalship by classical models

of excellence, or raised a finished standard of style, perhaps we

must concede that, on a minor scale, Klopstock did something of

that service in every one of these departments. His works were at

least Miltonic in their choice of subjects, if ludicrously

non-Miltonic in their treatment of those subjects. And, whether due

to him or not, it is undeniable that in his time the mother-tongue

of Germany revived from the most absolute degradation on record, to

its ancient purity. In the time of Gottsched, the authors of

Germany wrote a macaronic jargon, in which French and Latin made up

a considerable proportion of every sentence: nay, it happened often

that foreign words were inflected with German forms; and the whole

result was such as to remind the reader of the medical examination

in the _Malade Imaginaire_ of Moliere,

"Quid poetea est a faire?

Saignare

Baignare

Ensuita purgare," &c.

Now is it reasonable to ascribe some share in the restoration of

good to Klopstock, both because his own writings exhibit nothing of

this most abject euphuism, (a euphuism expressing itself not in

fantastic refinements on the staple of the language, but altogether

in rejecting it for foreign words and idioms,) and because he wrote

expressly on the subject of style and composition?

Wieland, meantime, if not enjoying so intense an acceptation as

Klopstock, had a more extensive one; and it is in vain to deny him

the praise of a festive, brilliant, and most versatile wit. The

Schlegels showed the haughty malignity of their ungenerous natures,

in depreciating Wieland, at a time when old age had laid a freezing

hand upon the energy which he would once have put forth in

defending himself. He was the Voltaire of Germany, and very much

more than the Voltaire; for his romantic and legendary poems are

above the level of Voltaire. But, on the other hand, he was a

Voltaire in sensual impurity. To work, to carry on a plot, to

affect his readers by voluptuous impressions,--these were the

unworthy aims of Wieland; and though a good-natured critic would

not refuse to make some allowance for a youthful poet's aberrations

in this respect, yet the indulgence cannot extend itself to mature

years. An old man corrupting his readers, attempting to corrupt

them, or relying for his effect upon corruptions already effected,

in the purity of their affections, is a hideous object; and that

must be a precarious influence indeed which depends for its

durability upon the licentiousness of men. Wieland, therefore,

except in parts, will not last as a national idol; but such he was

nevertheless for a time.

Burger wrote too little of any expansive compass to give the

measure of his powers, or to found national impression;

Lichtenberg, though a very sagacious observer, never rose into what

can be called a power, he did not modify his age; yet these were

both men of extraordinary talent, and Burger a man of undoubted

genius. On the other hand, Lessing was merely a man of talent, but

of talent in the highest degree adapted to popularity. His very

defects, and the shallowness of his philosophy, promoted his

popularity; and by comparison with the French critics on the

dramatic or scenical proprieties he is ever profound. His plummet,

if not suited to the soundless depths of Shakspeare, was able ten

times over to fathom the little rivulets of Parisian philosophy.

This he did effectually, and thus unconsciously levelled the paths

for Shakspeare, and for that supreme dominion which he has since

held over the German stage, by crushing with his sarcastic

shrewdness the pretensions of all who stood in the way. At that

time, and even yet, the functions of a literary man were very

important in Germany; the popular mind and the popular instinct

pointed one way, those of the little courts another. Multitudes of

little German states (many of which were absorbed since 1816 by the

process of _mediatizing_) made it their ambition to play at

keeping mimic armies in their pay, and to ape the greater military

sovereigns, by encouraging French literature only, and the French

language at their courts. It was this latter propensity which had

generated the anomalous macaronic dialect, of which we have already

spoken as a characteristic circumstance in the social features of

literary Germany during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Nowhere else, within the records of human follies, do we find a

corresponding case, in which the government and the patrician

orders in the state, taking for granted, and absolutely postulating

the utter worthlessness for intellectual aims of those in and by

whom they maintained their own grandeur and independence,

undisguisedly and even professedly sought to ally themselves with a

foreign literature, foreign literati, and a foreign language. In

this unexampled display of scorn for native resources, and the

consequent collision between the two principles of action, all

depended upon the people themselves. For a time the wicked and most

profligate contempt of the local governments for that native merit

which it was their duty to evoke and to cherish, naturally enough

produced its own justification. Like Jews or slaves, whom all the

world have agreed to hold contemptible, the German literati found

it hard to make head against so obstinate a prejudgment; and too

often they became all that they were presumed to be. _Sint

Maecenates, non deerunt, Flacce, Marones._ And the converse too

often holds good--that when all who should have smiled scowl upon a

man, he turns out the abject thing they have predicted. Where

Frenchified Fredericks sit upon German thrones, it should not

surprise us to see a crop of Gottscheds arise as the best fruitage

of the land. But when there is any latent nobility in the popular

mind, such scorn, by its very extremity, will call forth its own

counteraction. It was perhaps good for Germany that a prince so

eminent in one aspect as _Fritz der einziger,_[Footnote: _"

Freddy the unique;"_ which is the name by which the Prussians

expressed their admiration of the martial and indomitable, though

somewhat fantastic, king.] should put on record so emphatically his

intense conviction, that no good thing could arise out of Germany.

This creed was expressed by the quality of the French minds which

he attracted to his court. The very refuse and dregs of the

Parisian coteries satisfied his hunger for French garbage; the very

offal of their shambles met the demand of his palate; even a

Maupertuis, so long as he could produce a French baptismal

certificate, was good enough to manufacture into the president of a

Berlin academy. Such scorn challenged a reaction: the contest lay

between the thrones of Germany and the popular intellect, and the

final result was inevitable. Once aware that they were insulted,

once enlightened to the full consciousness of the scorn which

trampled on them as intellectual and predestined Helots, even the

mild-tempered Germans became fierce, and now began to aspire, not

merely under the ordinary instincts of personal ambition, but with

a vindictive feeling, and as conscious agents of retribution. It

became a pleasure with the German author, that the very same works

which elevated himself, wreaked his nation upon their princes, and

poured retorted scorn upon their most ungenerous and unparental

sovereigns. Already, in the reign of the martial Frederick, the men

who put most weight of authority into his contempt of Germans,

--Euler, the matchless Euler, Lambert, and Immanuel Kant,--had

vindicated the preeminence of German mathematics. Already, in 1755,

had the same Immanuel Kant, whilst yet a probationer for the chair

of logic in a Prussian university, sketched the outline of that

philosophy which has secured the admiration, though not the assent

of all men known and proved to have understood it, of all men able

to state its doctrines in terms admissible by its disciples.

Already, and even previously, had Haller, who wrote in German,

placed himself at the head of the current physiology. And in the

fields of science or of philosophy, the victory was already decided

for the German intellect in competition with the French.

But the fields of literature were still comparatively barren.

Klopstock was at least an anomaly; Lessing did not present himself

in the impassioned walks of literature; Herder was viewed too much

in the exclusive and professional light of a clergyman; and, with

the exception of John Paul Bichter, a man of most original genius,

but quite unfitted for general popularity, no commanding mind arose

in Germany with powers for levying homage from foreign nations,

until the appearance, as a great scenical poet, of Frederick

Schiller.

The father of this great poet was Caspar Schiller, an officer in

the military service of the Duke of Wurtemberg. He had previously

served as a surgeon in the Bavarian army; but on his final return

to his native country of Wurtemberg, and to the service of his

native prince, he laid aside his medical character for ever, and

obtained a commission as ensign and adjutant. In 1763, the peace of

Paris threw him out of his military employment, with the nominal

rank of captain. But, having conciliated the duke's favor, he was

still borne on the books of the ducal establishment; and, as a

planner of ornamental gardens, or in some other civil capacity, he

continued to serve his serene highness for the rest of his life.

The parents of Schiller were both pious, upright persons, with that

loyal fidelity to duty, and that humble simplicity of demeanor

towards their superiors, which is so often found among the

unpretending natives of Germany. It is probable, however, that

Schiller owed to his mother exclusively the preternatural

endowments of his intellect. She was of humble origin, the daughter

of a baker, and not so fortunate as to have received much

education. But she was apparently rich in gifts of the heart and

the understanding. She read poetry with delight; and through the

profound filial love with which she had inspired her son, she found

it easy to communicate her own literary tastes. Her husband was not

illiterate, and had in mature life so laudably applied himself to

the improvement of his own defective knowledge, that at length he

thought himself capable of appearing before the public as an

author. His book related simply to the subjects of his professional

experience as a horticulturist, and was entitled _Die Baumzurht

im Grossen_(On the Management of Forests.) Some merit we must

suppose it to have had, since the public called for a second

edition of it long after his own death, and even after that of his

illustrious son. And although he was a plain man, of no

pretensions, and possibly even of slow faculties, he has left

behind him a prayer, in which there is one petition of sublime and

pathetic piety, worthy to be remembered by the side of Agar's wise

prayer against the almost equal temptations of poverty and riches.

At the birth of his son, he had been reflecting with sorrowful

anxiety, not unmingled with self-reproach, on his own many

disqualifications for conducting the education of the child.

But at length, reading in his own manifold imperfections but so

many reiterations of the necessity that he should rely upon God's

bounty, converting his very defects into so many arguments of hope

and confidence in heaven, he prayed thus: "Oh God, that knowest my

poverty in good gifts for my son's inheritance, graciously permit

that, even as the want of bread became to thy Son's hunger-stricken

flock in the wilderness the pledge of overflowing abundance, so

likewise my darkness may, in its sad extremity, carry with it the

measure of thy unfathomable light; and because I, thy worm, cannot

give to my son the least of blessings, do thou give the greatest;

because in my hands there is not any thing, do thou from thine pour

out all things; and that temple of a new-born spirit, which I

cannot adorn even with earthly ornaments of dust and ashes, do thou

irradiate with the celestial adornment of thy presence, and finally

with that peace that passeth all understanding." Reared at the feet

of parents so pious and affectionate, Schiller would doubtless pass

a happy childhood; and probably to this utter tranquillity of his

earlier years, to his seclusion from all that could create pain, or

even anxiety, we must ascribe the unusual dearth of anecdotes from

this period of his life; a dearth which has tempted some of his

biographers into improving and embellishing some puerile stories,

which a man of sense will inevitably reject as too trivial for his

gravity or too fantastical for his faith. That nation is happy,

according to a common adage, which furnishes little business to the

historian; for such a vacuity in facts argues a condition of

perfect peace and silent prosperity. That childhood is happy, or

may generally be presumed such, which has furnished few records of

external experience, little that has appeared in doing or in

suffering to the eyes of companions; for the child who has been

made happy by early thoughtfulness, and by infantine struggles with

the great ideas of his origin and his destination, (ideas which

settle with a deep, dove-like brooding upon the mind of childhood,

more than of mature life, vexed with inroads from the noisy world,)

will not manifest the workings of his spirit by much of external

activity. The _fallentis semita vitae_, that path of noiseless

life, which eludes and deceives the conscious notice both of its

subject and of all around him, opens equally to the man and to the

child; and the happiest of all childhoods will have been that of

which the happiness has survived and expressed itself, not in

distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the

hauntings of meditative power.

Such a childhood, in the bosom of maternal tenderness, was probably

passed by Schiller; and his first awaking to the world of strife

and perplexity happened in his fourteenth year. Up to that period

his life had been vagrant, agreeably to the shifting necessities of

the ducal service, and his education desultory and domestic. But in

the year 1773 he was solemnly entered as a member of a new

academical institution, founded by the reigning duke, and recently

translated to his little capital of Stuttgard. This change took

place at the special request of the duke, who, under the mask of

patronage, took upon himself the severe control of the whole simple

family. The parents were probably both too humble and dutiful in

spirit towards one whom they regarded in the double light of

sovereign lord and of personal benefactor, ever to murmur at the

ducal behests, far less to resist them. The duke was for them an

earthly providence; and they resigned themselves, together with

their child, to the disposal of him who dispensed their earthly

blessings, not less meekly than of Him whose vicegerent they

presumed him to be. In such a frame of mind, requests are but

another name for commands; and thus it happened that a second

change arose upon the first, even more determinately fatal to the

young Schiller's happiness. Hitherto he had cherished a day-dream

pointing to the pastoral office in some rural district, as that

which would harmonize best with his intellectual purposes, with his

love of quiet, and by means of its preparatory requirements, best

also with his own peculiar choice of studies. But this scheme he

now found himself compelled to sacrifice; and the two evils which

fell upon him concurrently in his new situation were, first, the

formal military discipline and monotonous routine of duty;

secondly, the uncongenial direction of the studies, which were

shaped entirely to the attainment of legal knowledge, and the

narrow service of the local tribunals. So illiberal and so

exclusive a system of education was revolting to the expansive mind

of Schiller; and the military bondage under which this system was

enforced, shocked the aspiring nobility of his moral nature, not

less than the technical narrowness of the studies shocked his

understanding. In point of expense the whole establishment cost

nothing at all to those parents who were privileged servants of the

duke: in this number were the parents of Schiller, and that single

consideration weighed too powerfully upon his filial piety to allow

of his openly murmuring at his lot; while on _their_ part the

parents were equally shy of encouraging a disgust which too

obviously tended to defeat the promises of ducal favor. This system

of monotonous confinement was therefore carried to its completion,

and the murmurs of the young Schiller were either dutifully

suppressed, or found vent only in secret letters to a friend. In

one point only Schiller was able to improve his condition; jointly

with the juristic department, was another for training young

aspirants to the medical profession. To this, as promising a more

enlarged scheme of study, Schiller by permission transferred

himself in 1775. But whatever relief he might find in the nature of

his new studies, he found none at all in the system of personal

discipline which prevailed.

Under the oppression of this detested system, and by pure reaction

against its wearing persecutions, we learn from Schiller himself,

that in his nineteenth year he undertook the earliest of his

surviving plays, the Robbers, beyond doubt the most tempestuous,

the most volcanic, we might say, of all juvenile creations anywhere

recorded. He himself calls it "a monster," and a monster it is; but

a monster which has never failed to convulse the heart of young

readers with the temperament of intellectual enthusiasm and

sensibility. True it is, and nobody was more aware of that fact

than Schiller himself in after years, the characters of the three

Moors, father and sons, are mere impossibilities; and some readers,

in whom the judicious acquaintance with human life in its realities

has outrun the sensibilities, are so much shocked by these

hypernatural phenomena, that they are incapable of enjoying the

terrific sublimities which on that basis of the visionary do really

exist. A poet, perhaps Schiller might have alleged, is entitled to

assume hypothetically so much in the previous positions or

circumstances of his agents as is requisite to the basis from which

he starts. It is undeniable that Shakspeare and others have availed

themselves of this principle, and with memorable success.

Shakspeare, for instance, _postulates_ his witches, his

Caliban, his Ariel: grant, he virtually says, such modes of

spiritual existence or of spiritual relations as a possibility; do

not expect me to demonstrate this, and upon that single concession

I will rear a superstructure that shall be self-consistent; every

thing shall be _internally_ coherent and reconciled, whatever

be its _external_ relations as to our human experience. But

this species of assumption, on the largest scale, is more within

the limits of credibility and plausible verisimilitude when applied

to modes of existence, which, after all, are in such total darkness

to us, (the limits of the possible being so undefined and shadowy

as to what can or cannot exist,) than the very slightest liberties

taken with human character, or with those principles of action,

motives, and feelings, upon which men would move under given

circumstances, or with the modes of action which in common prudence

they would be likely to adopt. The truth is, that, as a coherent

work of art, the Robbers is indefensible; but, however monstrous it

may be pronounced, it possesses a power to agitate and convulse,

which will always obliterate its great faults to the young, and to

all whose judgment is not too much developed. And the best apology

for Schiller is found in his own words, in recording the

circumstances and causes under which this anomalous production

arose. "To escape," says he, "from the formalities of a discipline

which was odious to my heart, I sought a retreat in the world of

ideas and shadowy possibilities, while as yet I knew nothing at all

of that human world from which I was harshly secluded by iron bars.

Of men, the actual men in this world below, I knew absolutely

nothing at the time when I composed my Robbers. Four hundred human

beings, it is true, were my fellow-prisoners in this abode; but

they were mere tautologies and reiterations of the self-same

mechanic creature, and like so many plaster casts from the same

original statue. Thus situated, of necessity I failed. In making

the attempt, my chisel brought out a monster, of which [and that

was fortunate] the world had no type or resemblance to show."

Meantime this demoniac drama produced very opposite results to

Schiller's reputation. Among the young men of Germany it was

received with an enthusiasm absolutely unparalleled, though it is

perfectly untrue that it excited some persons of rank and splendid

expectations (as a current fable asserted) to imitate Charles Moor

in becoming robbers. On the other hand, the play was of too

powerful a cast not in any case to have alarmed his serenity the

Duke of Wurtemberg; for it argued a most revolutionary mind, and

the utmost audacity of self-will. But besides this general ground

of censure, there arose a special one, in a quarter so remote, that

this one fact may serve to evidence the extent as well as intensity

of the impression made. The territory of the Grisons had been

called by Spiegelberg, one of the robbers, "the Thief's Athens."

Upon this the magistrates of that country presented a complaint to

the duke; and his highness having cited Schiller to his presence,

and severely reprimanded him, issued a decree that this dangerous

young student should henceforth confine himself to his medical

studies.

The persecution which followed exhibits such extraordinary

exertions of despotism, even for that land of irresponsible power,

that we must presume the duke to have relied more upon the hold

which he had upon Schiller through his affection for parents so

absolutely dependent on his highness's power, than upon any laws,

good or bad, which he could have pleaded as his warrant. Germany,

however, thought otherwise of the new tragedy than the serene

critic of Wurtemburg: it was performed with vast applause at the

neighboring city of Mannheim; and thither, under a most excusable

interest in his own play, the young poet clandestinely went. On his

return he was placed under arrest. And soon afterwards, being now

thoroughly disgusted, and, with some reason, alarmed by the tyranny

of the duke, Schiller finally eloped to Mannheim, availing himself

of the confusion created in Stuttgard by the visit of a foreign

prince.

At Mannheim he lived in the house of Dalberg, a man of some rank

and of sounding titles, but in Mannheim known chiefly as the

literary manager (or what is called director) of the theatre. This

connection aided in determining the subsequent direction of

Schiller's talents; and his Fiesco, his Intrigue and Love, his Don

Carlos, and his Maria Stuart, followed within a short period of

years. None of these are so far free from the faults of the Robbers

as to merit a separate notice; for with less power, they are almost

equally licentious.

Finally, however, he brought out his Wallenstein, an immortal

drama, and, beyond all competition, the nearest in point of

excellence to the dramas of Shakspeare. The position of the

characters of Max Piccolomini and the Princess Thekla is the finest

instance of what, in a critical sense, is called _relief,_

that literature offers. Young, innocent, unfortunate, among a camp

of ambitious, guilty, and blood-stained men, they offer a depth and

solemnity of impression which is equally required by way of

contrast and of final repose.

From Mannheim, where he had a transient love affair with Laura

Dalberg, the daughter of his friend the director, Schiller removed

to Jena, the celebrated university in the territory of Weimar. The

grand duke of that German Florence was at this time gathering

around him the most eminent of the German intellects; and he was

eager to enroll Schiller in the body of his professors. In 1799

Schiller received the chair of civil history; and not long after he

married Miss Lengefeld, with whom he had been for some time

acquainted. In 1803 he was ennobled; that is, he was raised to the

rank of gentleman, and entitled to attach the prefix of _Von_

to his name. His income was now sufficient for domestic comfort and

respectable independence; while in the society of Goethe, Herder,

and other eminent wits, he found even more relaxation for his

intellect, than his intellect, so fervent and so self-sustained,

could require.

Meantime the health of Schiller was gradually undermined: his lungs

had been long subject to attacks of disease; and the warning

indications which constantly arose of some deep-seated organic

injuries in his pulmonary system ought to have put him on his guard

for some years before his death. Of all men, however, it is

remarkable that Schiller was the most criminally negligent of his

health; remarkable, we say, because for a period of four years

Schiller had applied himself seriously to the study of medicine.

The strong coffee, and the wine, which he drank, may not have been

so injurious as his biographers suppose; but his habit of sitting

up through the night, and defrauding his wasted frame of all

natural and restorative sleep, had something in it of that guilt

which belongs to suicide. On the 9th of May, 1805, his complaint

reached its crisis. Early in the morning he became delirious; at

noon his delirium abated; and at four in the afternoon he fell into

a gentle unagitated sleep, from which he soon awoke. Conscious that

he now stood on the very edge of the grave, he calmly and fervently

took a last farewell of his friends. At six in the evening he fell

again into sleep, from which, however, he again awoke once more to

utter the memorable declaration, "that many things were growing

plain and clear to his understanding." After this the cloud of

sleep again settled upon him; a sleep which soon changed into the

cloud of death.

This event produced a profound impression throughout Germany. The

theatres were closed at Weimar, and the funeral was conducted with

public honors. The position in point of time, and the peculiar

services of Schiller to the German literature, we have already

stated: it remains to add, that in person he was tall, and of a

strong bony structure, but not muscular, and strikingly lean. His

forehead was lofty, his nose aquiline, and his mouth almost of

Grecian beauty. With other good points about his face, and with

auburn hair, it may be presumed that his whole appearance was pleasing

and impressive, while in latter years the character of sadness and

contemplative sensibility deepened the impression of his

countenance. We have said enough of his intellectual merit, which

places him in our judgment at the head of the Trans-Rhenish

literature. But we add in concluding, that Frederick von Schiller

was something more than a great author; he was also in an eminent

sense a great man; and his works are not more worthy of being

studied for their singular force and originality, than his moral

character from its nobility and aspiring grandeur.