[Footnote 100:
Lasz doch die Frauen in Ruhe mit ihrer Würde, und sorge
Für die deine, mein Freund. Ihre bewahren sie schon.]
[Footnote 101:
Nun, was denkt ihr vom Reiche der Schatten? Es schattet und schattet
Dasz man vor Schatten umher nichts von den Schatten erkennt.]
[Footnote 102:
In Weimar und in Jena macht man Hexameter wie der;
Aber die Pentameter sind doch noch excellenter.]
CHAPTER XV
Later Poems
So führt zu seiner Jugend Hütten,
Zu seiner Unschuld reinem Glück,
Vom fernen Ausland fremder Sitten
Den Flüchtling der Gesang zurück,
In der Natur getreuen Armen
Von kalten Regeln zu erwarmen.
'The Power of Song'.
The dominant note of Schiller's later poetry is intellectual seriousness; wherefore, if there be those for whom intellectual seriousness is not a quality of poetry at all, for them he has not written. The element of reflection is nearly always prominent in his verse, though there are a few of his poems, notably his best ballads, in which it is conspicuously lacking. What we usually hear is the man of culture commenting upon life, and everywhere he makes his appeal to universal sentiments. The spontaneity, or seeming spontaneity, of the great lyrists was no part of his gift. To catch a fleeting fancy, or some eccentricity of private emotion, and fix it in musical verse of a vague suggestiveness, was not in his line. If he had ever, like Heine, imagined himself joining his sweetheart in the grave and defying the resurrection in a rapturous embrace, he would probably have thought it beneath his dignity to versify the whimsy. Of course his verse is self-revelation, without which poetry cannot be; but it is the revelation of a soul dwelling habitually in the upper altitudes of thought and emotion, and always assuming that fellow-mortals who care for poetry at all will be capable of a serious joy in the things of the mind.