Sue not for other crowns to wear

The Sisters who have vanish'd from
you here,
Gather beneath the common mother's zone !
What souls refin'd have reach'd by finest sense,
Must all perfection be-all excellence.

Soar, then, on daring wing sublime,
Above the course of ignorant present time;
And let the coming Age its features trace
Already on your mirror's face.

Through many-winding paths of rich variety,
Entwisted thousand-fold in close embrace,
Draw nigh unto the throne of Sovereign Unity!

E'en as in seven mild rays the white
With loveliest glance refracted gleams,
And as the seven bright rainbow beams,
Melting, return to that pure primal light;
So sport ye, thousand-fold, in radiant glow
Of magic splendour round the dazzled gaze!
Into one bond of truth returning flow-

One stream of all-encircling blaze!

Einer jungen Freundin in's Stambuch. 1788.

VERSES INSCRIBED IN A YOUNG

LADY'S ALBUM.

THIS tender and gallant effusion has been generally supposed to be addressed to Charlotte von Lengefeld, the lady whom Schiller afterwards married; and though one of his latest Biographers has endeavoured to prove that, with reference to her, they are wholly inapplicable in point of known character and disposition, he has hardly shown ground sufficient to discredit the testimony afforded by common repute, while, on the other hand, the circumstance of an unwelcome absence during the period of courtship, occasioned by his mistress's sudden departure for the Court of Weimar, seems enough to have awakened the Poet's sensibilities to a state of mind resembling that which produced the beautiful ballad of the "Nut-brown Maid," or the still more exquisite song of "O Nancy, wilt thou go with me?”

A BLOOMING Child, enwreath'd 'mid sports and graces

In circling dance-so plays the world round thee,
Sweet friend!-Yet, as thy heart its image traces,
As mirror'd on thy mind's translucent sea,
Not such it is. The silent homage render'd
To thy soul's worth, by holy thoughts engender'd-
The wonders that thy self hast wrought-
The charms thy fancy sheds in such profusion
O'er human life, with all its bright illusion,

That live but in thy secret thoughtThe lovely witchery of untainted youth, The Talisman of Innocence and truth

I fain would see who sets those gifts at nought.

Joyous you float along amidst abundance

Of flowers, that crown your path with glad redun

dance,

Those happy beings, who worship thee, their sunThose souls thyself hast won.

Be happy in the spell of love's own making!-
And may no sad awaking

Hurl headlong from thy dream's aspiring flight;
But, like the flowers thy gay parterres adorning,
So plant them, as the distant stars of morning,
Not for the touch, but for thine eye's delight.
Created, but to glad thee with their bloom,
Soon would they wither at thy foot's rude scorning-
The nearer thee, the nearer to their tomb.

POEMS OF THE THIRD PERIOD.

IDEAL, DIDACTIC, EPIGRAMMATIC.

1795, 1796.

Das Ideal und das Leben.

OR THE REALM OF SHADOWS.

AN interval of seven years elapsed between the date of the latest compositions of the foregoing series, and that of the earliest of the present; and during this long period of suspense the Muse of Schiller appears to have been completely silent, except in some occasional works of translation. The change of life incident to his marriage and domestic establishment, and the duties of his Jena professorship requiring a long course of study to which he had hitherto been a stranger, and to which we owe his great historical works on the Revolution of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War, necessarily occupied his mind, during a considerable portion of this interval, to the exclusion of other objects; and his Philosophical speculations, especially those of the class to which German Literature has assigned the term of Esthetic, engrossed all the remaining time not consumed by attacks of that fatal and wasting disease which was destined to end both his labours and his life after ten years more had been added to his earthly existence.

The first fruits of his return to Poetry are marked by the influence of his philosophical habits of thinking, to a degree which renders them sometimes almost unintelligible without the aid of a commentary, for which his various philoso

phical treatises furnish ample materials. The remarkable poem, for instance, which is here placed at the head of its division, is aptly designated by one of the Poet's latest critical Biographers as "the crowning garland "-die Blumenkröne-of his principal Esthetic treatise-his Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Its original title-Das Reich der Schatten-which is here retained as being more translateable than that which was afterwards substituted, and which could be rendered only by a Periphrasis, must be taken as expressive, not of the meaning we usually assign to the word Shadows as applying to a future state of existence, but as opposed to Substance or Reality-the Ideal World,—as in the line,

"An dem SCHEINE mag der Blick sich weiden."

"This Lyrico-Didactic Poem," says Hoffmeister, "rests entirely on the figure of Antithesis "—a mode of conveying his ideas, so familiar to the Poet from his philosophical habits of thinking, that a considerable portion of that part of his Lyrical Poetry to which his Biographer has assigned the general designation, Ideal, has been further particularized as Antithetical, in contradistinction to that which he denominates the Pure Ideal-a division which is felt to partake too much of German refinement for the mere English reader, and is therefore here made to give place to chronological arrangement, though it is remarkable how nearly the divisions are co-extensive. In the present poem, for at least one half of it, the see-saw is so continual as to have been felt by the Author himself on a later revision, when he was induced, probably for the sake of softening the effect of it, to sacrifice three entire stanzas, which are here, however, restored, and are those included in brackets.

It has already been observed that the poem is to be regarded in the light of a sequel to the "Resignation," and as taking up the sentiment with which that earlier composition, to all appearance hopelessly, closes.

The general Argument of the poem thus connected, ap