ant lands; to glow in human hearts, when the heart that conceived
them had long been mouldered into common dust. To the lovers of
genius, this little garden-house might have been a place to visit as a
chosen shrine; nor will they learn without regret that the walls of
it, yielding to the hand of time, have already crumbled into ruin, and
are now no longer to be traced. The piece of ground that it stood on
is itself hallowed with a glory that is bright, pure and abiding; but
the literary pilgrim could not have surveyed, without peculiar
emotion, the simple chamber, in which Schiller wrote the _Reich der
Schatten_, the _Spaziergang_, the _Ideal_, and the immortal scenes of
_Wallenstein_.

The last-named work had cost him many an anxious, given him many a
pleasant, hour. For seven years it had continued in a state of
irregular, and oft-suspended progress; sometimes 'lying endless and
formless' before him; sometimes on the point of being given up
altogether. The multitude of ideas, which he wished to incorporate in
the structure of the piece, retarded him; and the difficulty of
contenting his taste, respecting the manner of effecting this,
retarded him still more. In _Wallenstein_ he wished to embody the more
enlarged notions which experience had given him of men, especially
which history had given him of generals and statesmen; and while
putting such characters in action, to represent whatever was, or could
be made, poetical, in the stormy period of the Thirty-Years War. As he
meditated on the subject, it continued to expand; in his fancy, it
assumed successively a thousand forms; and after all due strictness of
selection, such was still the extent of materials remaining on his
hands, that he found it necessary to divide the play into three parts,
distinct in their arrangements, but in truth forming a continuous
drama of eleven acts. In this shape it was sent forth to the world, in
1799; a work of labour and persevering anxiety, but of anxiety and
labour, as it then appeared, which had not been bestowed in vain.
_Wallenstein_ is by far the best performance he had yet produced; it
merits a long chapter of criticism by itself; and a few hurried pages
are all that we can spend on it.

As a porch to the great edifice stands Part first, entitled
_Wallenstein's Camp_, a piece in one act. It paints, with much humour
and graphical felicity, the manners of that rude tumultuous host which
Wallenstein presided over, and had made th