While Theophilus was wending his way to Dresden, Schiller was journeying toward Weimar in the stage-coach. After giving Theophilus the money collected for him, Schiller had hurried to the post-office, where his friends were waiting to take leave of him, and bid the traveller a last farewell.
“Farewell! We shall soon meet again; I will soon return!” cried Schiller from the stage-coach, as it rolled out of the court-yard on through the city gate into the soft summer night.
“Charlotte is awaiting me!” murmured Schiller, as he sank back on the hard cushions. “Charlotte is awaiting me. She is the friend of my soul. Our spirits belong to each other, and I will show my friend the wounds of my heart, in order that she may heal them with the balsam of tender friendship.”
But, strange to say, the nearer he came to his journey’s end, the more joyfully his heart throbbed, the less painful its wounds became.
“Charlotte, dear Charlotte, if I were but already with you! I feel that the fire which drove me from Mannheim is not yet extinguished; a breath from your lips will suffice to kindle the spark into a conflagration.”
There is Weimar! Now the stage-coach has entered the city. Schiller is on classic ground! On the ground where Germany’s greatest poets and intellects dwell. Wieland and Herder, Bertuch and Bode, dwell here; here are also many artists and actors of eminence, and here lives the genial Duke Charles August! And yet Weimar is desolate, for Goethe is not here; he left more than a year ago.
Schiller knew this, but what did he care now! He had so longed to tread this classic ground that his heart throbbed with joy at the prospect of seeing and becoming acquainted with the celebrated men whose works he had read with so much enthusiasm—whom he could now meet with the feeling that he was not unworthy of them, and that he also now filled a place in the republic of intellect.
He had been occupied with these thoughts during the whole journey; but now they suddenly vanished. He thought only of Madame von Kalb, the friend he had not seen for two years—the friend whose dear lips had called him to her side in the hour of his deepest distress.
He had taken lodgings in the chief hotel of the city; it was already quite late in the evening, so late that it seemed hardly proper to call on a lady. He would not remain in his solitary chamber, but would walk out, and at least look at the house in which she lived. If the lights had, however, not yet been extinguished, if she should still be awake— He did not complete this thought, but sprang down the steps, ordered the servant, who was walking to and fro in the hall, to accompany him and show him the house in which Madame von Kalb lived, and rushed down the designated street with such long and rapid strides that the servant could scarcely follow him.
There is the house in which Madame von Kalb lives, a modest little house at the entrance of the park. A light is still burning behind the basement windows, and he sees the shadow of a tall woman pass across the closed curtains. “That is her figure, I would recognize it among thousands! That is Charlotte!”