till her
Father's last release. She would never have consoled
herself, had he died a few days after her departure home.

"Thou understandest how in the first days of this fatal
breach among us, while so many painful things storm-in upon
our good Mother, thy Christophine could not have left, even
had the Post been in free course. But this still remains
stopped, and we must wait the War-events on the Franconian,
Swabian and Palatinate borders. How much this absence of thy
Wife must afflict, I feel along with thee; but who can fight
against such a chain of inevitable destinies? Alas, public
and universal disorder rolls up into itself our private
events too, in the fatalest way.

"Thy Wife longs from her heart for home; and she only the
more deserves our regard that she, against her inclination
and her interest, resolved to be led only by the thought of
her filial duties. Now, however, she certainly will not
delay an hour longer with her return, the instant it can be
entered upon without danger and impossibility. Comfort her
too when thou writest to her; it grieves her to know thee
forsaken, and to have no power to help thee.

"Fare right well, dear Brother.--Thine,

SCHILLER."

'Nearly at the same time he wrote to his Mother:

"Grieved to the heart, I take up the pen to lament with you
and my dear Sisters the loss we have just sustained. In
truth, for a good while past I have expected nothing else:
but when the inevitable actually comes, it is always a sad
and overwhelming stroke. To think that one who was so dear
to us, whom we hung upon with the feelings of early
childhood, and also in later years were bound to by respect
and love, that such an object is gone from the world, that
with all our striving we cannot bring it back,--to think of
this is always something frightful. And when, like you, my
dearest best Mother, one has shared with the lost Friend and
Husband joy and sorrow for so many long years, the parting
is all the painfuler. Even when I look away from what the
good Father that is gone was to myself and to us all, I
cannot without mournful emotion contemplate the close of so
steadfast and active a life, which God continued to him so
long, in such soundness of body and mind, and which he
managed so honou