s health. An attack of pneumonia in the
winter of 1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he
recovered from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse
than the first. He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went
abroad that he was dead. After a while he rallied, but never again to
be strong and well. From this time forth he must be thought of as a
semi-invalid, doomed to a very cautious mode of living and expectant
of an early death. It was to be a fourteen years' battle between a
heroic soul and an ailing body.

For a while, owing to the forced cessation of the literary work on
which his small income depended, he was in great distress for lack of
money. His wife, while of noble family, had brought nothing but
herself to the marriage partnership. And then, just as in the dark
days at Mannheim in 1784, help seemed to come from the clouds. Two
Danish noblemen, ardent admirers quite unknown to him personally,
heard of his painful situation and offered him a pension of a thousand
thalers a year for three years. No conditions whatever were attached
to the gift; he was simply to follow his inclination, free from all
anxiety about a livelihood. Without hesitation he accepted the gift
and thus found himself, for the first time in his life, really free to
do as he chose. What he chose was to use his freedom for a grapple
with Kant's philosophy. Today this seems a strange choice for a sick
poet, but let Schiller himself explain what lay in his mind. He wrote
to Koerner:

"It is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to
philosophize. Criticism must repair the damage it has done me. And it
has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many years
that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule.
Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the
play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is
conscious of being watched. But if I once reach the point where
artistic procedure becomes natural, like education for the
well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old freedom and
know no bounds but those of its own making."

From these words we understand the nature of Schiller's enterprise--he
wished to fathom the laws of beauty. It seemed to him that beauty
could not be altogether a matter of changing taste, opinion, and
fashion; that somehow or other it must be grounded in eternal laws
either of the ex