Life of Friedrich Schiller (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1889 Excerpt: ...power of abstracting himself from the paralysing influence of external sorrows and cares was very remarkable, and on the whole to be envied. Though profoundly distressed at the unhappy condition of his parents and sisters, and harassed at home by the usual anxieties of a growing family, he was for the most part able to continue his labours both as editor and poet with at least as much energy and enthusiasm as before. As, however, his own health wa.s continually failing, he removed, in the Spring of the following year (1797), from the house in the narrow streets of Jena to another about two hundred yards outside the town-walls to the south. It stood in a garden of its own, at the bottom of which the Leutra, a little tributary of the Saale from the hills on its left bank, has cut itself a deep channel through the rock. Above the brook a summer-house had been built, commanding a view, uninterrupted then by any embankment or railway station, over gently rising fields and orchards to the pine-covered heights of the Forst; and on the other side, to the hills beyond the river. Here he worked, or conversed with a friend. "In this bower," said Goethe, as he sat in it with Eckermann thirty years afterwards, "on these benches now almost broken down, we have often sat together by this old stone table, and exchanged many a good and great word. He was then in the thirties, and I in the forties; both still full of high aspirations, and that was something. All that is past and gone; I am no longer what I have been, but the old earth still holds together, and air and water and ground are still the same." Schiller had hardly settled in his new home, when with his usual energy he set to work upon poems for the next year's Almanack. He and Goethe determined...