calls "walking on all-fours." From
dinner till tea, reading, letter-writing, the newspapers, and frequently
a siesta--he, also, was a heroic sleeper, and slept whenever he had the
chance. After tea, poetry, or whatever else his fancy chose--whatever
work called upon the creative power. It is true that he went to bed
regularly at half-past ten, so that his actual consumption of midnight
oil was not extravagant. But such of it as he did consume served as a
stimulant for the purely imaginative part of his work, when the labor
that required no stimulant was over and done.

Blake was a painter by day and a poet by night; he often got out of bed
at midnight and wrote for hours, following by instinct the deliberate
practice of less impulsive workers.

Schiller evolved his finest plays in a summer-house, which he built for
himself, with a single chamber, on the top of an acclivity near Jena,
commanding a beautiful prospect of the valley of the Saal and the fir
mountains of the neighboring forest. On sitting down to his desk at
night, says Doering, he was wont to keep some strong coffee or wine
chocolate, but more frequently a flask of old Rhenish or champagne,
standing by him: often the neighbors would hear him earnestly declaiming
in the silence of the night, and he might be seen walking swiftly to and
fro in his chamber, then suddenly throwing himself down into his chair
and writing, drinking at intervals from the glass that stood near him.
In winter he continued at his desk till four, or even five, o'clock in
the morning; in summer, till toward three. The "pernicious expedient of
stimulants" served only to waste the more speedily and surely, as Mr.
Carlyle says, his already wasted fund of physical strength. Schiller
used an artificial stimulus altogether peculiar to himself: he found it
impossible, according to the well-known anecdote, to work except in a
room filled with the scent of rotten apples, which he kept in a drawer
of his writing-table, in order to keep up his necessary mental
atmosphere.

In the park at Weimar we have other glimpses of Schiller; frequently he
was to be seen there, wandering among the groves and remote
avenues,--for he loved solitary walks,--with a note-book in his hand;
now loitering along, now moving rapidly on; "if any one appeared in
sight, he would dart into another alley, that his dream might not be
broken." In Joerden's Lexicon we read that whatever Schiller intended to
write, he first c