es, smirched
by traces of shoe-blacking, giving to the legs a bigger diameter than
the thighs, squeezed into their tight-fitting breeches, could boast
of. Hardly, or not at all, able to bend his knees, the whole man moved
like a stork.'

'The Poet's form,' says this Witness elsewhere, a bit of a dilettante
artist it seems, 'had somewhat the following appearance: Long straight
stature; long in the legs, long in the arms; pigeon-breasted; his neck
very long; something rigorously stiff; in gait and carriage not the
smallest elegance. His brow was broad; the nose thin, cartilaginous,
white of colour, springing out at a notably sharp angle, much bent,--a
parrot-nose, and very sharp in the point (according to Dannecker the
Sculptor, Schiller, who took snuff, had pulled it out so with his
hand). The red eyebrows, over the deep-lying dark-gray eyes, were bent
too close together at the nose, which gave him a pathetic expression.
The lips were thin, energetic; the under-lip protruding, as if pushed
forward by the inspiration of his feelings; the chin strong; cheeks
pale, rather hollow than full, freckly; the eyelids a little inflamed;
the bushy hair of the head dark red; the whole head rather ghostlike
than manlike, but impressive even in repose, and all expression when
Schiller declaimed. Neither the features nor the somewhat shrieky
voice could he subdue. Dannecker,' adds the satirical Witness, 'has
unsurpassably cut this head in marble for us.'[52]

[Footnote 52: Schwab, _Schiller's Leben_ (Stuttgart, 1841),
p. 68.]

'The publication of the _Robbers_' (Autumn 1781),--'which Schiller,
driven on by rage and desperation, had composed in the fetters of the
Karl's School,--raised him on the sudden to a phenomenon on which all
eyes in Stuttgart were turned. What, with careless exaggeration, he
had said to a friend some months before, on setting forth his _Elegy
on the Death of a Young Man_, "The thing has made my name hereabouts
more famous than twenty years of practice would have done; but it is a
name like that of him who burnt the Temple of Ephesus: God be merciful
to me a sinner!" might now with all seriousness be said of the
impression his _Robbers_ made on the harmless townsfolk of Stuttgart.
But how did Father Schiller at first take up this eccentric product of
his Son, which openly declared war on all existing order? Astonishment
and terror, anger and detestation, boundless anxiety, with touches of
admiration and