ut; with a delicacy of feeling
which tended towards bashfulness and timidity, there was mingled in
him a fervid impetuosity, which was ever struggling through its
concealment, and indicating that he felt deeply and strongly, as well
as delicately. Such a turn of mind easily took the form of religion,
prescribed to it by early example and early affections, as well as
nature. Schiller looked forward to the sacred profession with
alacrity: it was the serious daydream of all his boyhood, and much of
his youth. As yet, however, the project hovered before him at a great
distance, and the path to its fulfilment offered him but little
entertainment. His studies did not seize his attention firmly; he
followed them from a sense of duty, not of pleasure. Virgil and
Horace he learned to construe accurately; but is said to have taken no
deep interest in their poetry. The tenderness and meek beauty of the
first, the humour and sagacity and capricious pathos of the last, the
matchless elegance of both, would of course escape his inexperienced
perception; while the matter of their writings must have appeared
frigid and shallow to a mind so susceptible. He loved rather to
meditate on the splendour of the Ludwigsburg theatre, which had
inflamed his imagination when he first saw it in his ninth year, and
given shape and materials to many of his subsequent reveries.[3] Under
these circumstances, his progress, with all his natural ability, could
not be very striking; the teachers did not fail now and then to visit
him with their severities; yet still there was a negligent success in
his attempts, which, joined to his honest and vivid temper, made men
augur well of him. The Stuttgard Examinators have marked him in their
records with the customary formula of approval, or, at worst, of
toleration. They usually designate him as 'a boy of good hope,' _puer
bonae spei_.

[Footnote 3: The first display of his poetic gifts occurred
also in his ninth year, but took its rise in a much humbler
and less common source than the inspiration of the stage. His
biographers have recorded this small event with a
conscientious accuracy, second only to that of Boswell and
Hawkins in regard to the Lichfield _duck_. 'The little tale,'
says one of them, 'is worth relating; the rather that, after
an interval of more than twenty years, Schiller himself, on
meeting with his early comrade (the late Dr. Elwert of
Kantstadt) for