26. WEIDEN, let graze or feast, i.e., mirror.
30. MISCHT VOM GRUND AUS, stirs from the very bottom.
16. Willing surrender, contented submission to the will of the Highest is the keynote of this poem.
9. childlike thrills of awe.
40, 41. IHRES DASEINS. Ihres refers to Geschlechter. To make it refer to Götter (and adopting the variant reading sie [i.e., Götter] instead of sich) makes an impossible metaphor, since the picture of a chain with its links cannot describe the eternal and changeless life of the gods, but only human life, generation following generation as link on link in a chain. Compare 31, where Goethe has used Wellen with the same purport.
17. Although a part of Faust, this poem is none the less a confession of Goethe himself. Over eighty years old, the poet surveys life as a watchman from his high tower, lets his gaze once more wander over the world, when evening comes, and lo, all is good.
11, 12. And as all things have pleased me, I am pleased with myself, i.e., the sum total of my life is good.
SCHILLER
Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg, November 10, 1759. His short life was one great heroic struggle. His first inclination was to study for the ministry, but the rigorous and arbitrary discipline of the Duke Karl Eugen, whose school the boy as the son of an officer had to enter, considered neither aptitude nor desire, and thus Schiller had to study medicine and become an army surgeon. That he might shape his own destiny he fled from Württemberg in 1782. The following years, in which Schiller gradually gained the recognition he deserved, were a bitter battle against poverty; and when in 1789 he had been made professor of history in Jena, only two years passed before illness forced him to resign. At that moment generous friends came to his aid, and from now on Schiller could live for his ideals.
As he had mastered the field of history, he now for years put his entire energy into the study of philosophy to round out his Weltanschauung (his view of life) and his personality. Even as he worked, he knew that his years were numbered, but his indomitable will forced the weak body to do its bidding, and the best of Schiller's dramas, the greatest of his philosophical poems, were written in these years of illness. Thus Schiller proved himself the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. Only a few weeks before his death he wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, "Am Ende sind wir doch beide Idealisten, und würden uns schämen, uns nachsagen zu lassen, daß die Dinge uns formten und wir nicht die Dinge." ("After all both of us are idealists and would be ashamed to have it reported of us that the things fashioned us and not we the things.") There was in Schiller, as Goethe said, ein Zug nach dem Höheren, a trend toward higher things. Schiller died in Weimar, May 9, 1805.