son they
would have found favor with the Greeks. The French poets tried to obey
exactly the law of the three unities; but they violate the law of
comprehensiveness, as they do not expound dramatic subjects by dramas but
by recitals."

Poetical creation was therefore viewed as free, but at the same time
responsible. Immediately, as if fecundity were the reward of
correctness, the German theatre became filled with true and living
characters. The stage widens under their steps that they may have room
to move. History with its great proportions and its terrible lessons, is
now able to take place on the stage. The whole Thirty Years' War passes
before us in "Wallenstein." We hear the tumult of camps, the disorder of
a fanatical and undisciplined army, peasants, recruits, sutlers,
soldiers. The illusion is complete, and enthusiasm breaks out among the
spectators. Similar merits attach to many other of Schiller's plays.

This new drama, which seemed to give all to the natural sphere, concedes
still more to the ideal. An able critic has said the details which are
the truth of history are also its poetry. Here the German school
professes a principle of the highest learning, and one that seems to be
borrowed from its profoundest philosophers; it is that of the universal
beauty of life, of the identity of beauty and existence. "Our
aesthetics," says Goethe, "speak a great deal of poetical or antipoetical
subjects; fundamentally there is no subject that has not its poetry; it
is for the poet to find it there."

Schiller and Goethe divide the empire over modern German poetry, and
represent its two principal powers; the one, Schiller, impassioned and
lyrical, pours his soul over all the subjects he touches; in him every
composition, ode, or drama is always one of his noble ideas, borrowing
its dress and ornament from the external world. He is a poet especially
through the heart, by the force with which he rushes in and carries you
with him. Goethe is especially an epic; no doubt he paints the passions
with admirable truth, but he commands them; like the god of the seas in
Virgil, he raises above the angry waves his calm and sublime forehead.

After this glance at the position and chief characteristics of Schiller,
it may be useful to offer a few remarks on those of the principal works
in this volume, his Aesthetical Letters and Essays. Schiller, in his
Aesthetical Essays, did not choose the pure abstract method of deduction
and c