n-hearted, generous, helpful; in the circle of his
family, kind, tender, sportive. And what gave an especial charm to all
this was, the unobtrusiveness with which it was attended: there was no
parade, no display, no particle of affectation; rating and conducting
himself simply as an honest man and citizen, he became greater by
forgetting that he was great.

Such were the prevailing habits of Schiller. That in the mild and
beautiful brilliancy of their aspect there must have been some specks
and imperfections, the common lot of poor humanity, who knows not?
That these were small and transient, we judge from the circumstance
that scarcely any hint of them has reached us: nor are we anxious to
obtain a full description of them. For practical uses, we can
sufficiently conjecture what they were; and the heart desires not to
dwell upon them. This man is passed away from our dim and tarnished
world: let him have the benefit of departed friends; let him be
transfigured in our thoughts, and shine there without the little
blemishes that clung to him in life.

Schiller gives a fine example of the German character: he has all its
good qualities in a high degree, with very few of its defects. We
trace in him all that downrightness and simplicity, that sincerity of
heart and mind, for which the Germans are remarked; their enthusiasm,
their patient, long-continuing, earnest devotedness; their
imagination, delighting in the lofty and magnificent; their intellect,
rising into refined abstractions, stretching itself into comprehensive
generalisations. But the excesses to which such a character is liable
are, in him, prevented by a firm and watchful sense of propriety. His
simplicity never degenerates into ineptitude or insipidity; his
enthusiasm must be based on reason; he rarely suffers his love of the
vast to betray him into toleration of the vague. The boy Schiller was
extravagant; but the man admits no bombast in his style, no inflation
in his thoughts or actions. He is the poet of truth; our
understandings and consciences are satisfied, while our hearts and
imaginations are moved. His fictions are emphatically nature copied
and embellished; his sentiments are refined and touchingly beautiful,
but they are likewise manly and correct; they exalt and inspire, but
they do not mislead. Above all, he has no cant; in any of its thousand
branches, ridiculous or hateful, none. He does not distort his
character or genius into shapes, which