The Project Gutenberg EBook of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54,
No. 334, August 1843, by Various

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Title: Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843

Author: Various

Release Date: April 13, 2008 [EBook #25065]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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BLACKWOOD'S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCXXXIV AUGUST, 1843. VOL. LIV.

FORMS AND BALLADS OF SCHILLER. BY SIR EDWARD LYTTON BULWER.

PART THE LAST.

We here close our attempts to convey to the English reader some notion,
however inadequate, of the genius and mind of Schiller. It is in these
Poems, rather, perhaps, than in his Dramas and Prose works, that the
upright earnestness of the mind, and the rich variety of the genius, are
best displayed. Here, certainly, can best be seen that peculiar union of
intellect and imagination which Mr Carlyle has so well distinguished as
Schiller's characteristic attribute, and in which it would be difficult
to name the modern poet by whom he is surpassed; and here the variety of
the genius is least restrained and limited by the earnestness of the
mind. For Schiller's variety is not that of Shakspeare, a creative and
universal spirit, passing with the breath of life into characters the
most diverse, and unidentified with the creations its invisible agency
invokes. But it is the variety of one in whom the consciousness of his
own existence is never laid aside; shown not so much in baring the minds
and hearts of others, as in developing the progress and the struggles of
his own, in the infinite gradations of joy and of sorrow, of exquisite
feeling and solemn thought. Hence, in the drama, arise his faults and
deficiencies; in his characters, he himself speaks. They are gigantic
images of his own moods at different epochs of his life--impassioned
with Moor--philosophizing with Posa--stately, tranquil, and