rably and well. Yes truly, it is not a small
thing to hold out so faithfully upon so long and toilsome a
course; and like him, in his seventy-third year, to part
from the world in so childlike and pure a mood. Might I but,
if it cost me all his sorrows, pass away from my life as
innocently as he from his! Life is so severe a trial; and
the advantages which Providence, in some respects, may have
granted me compared with him, are joined with so many
dangers for the heart and for its true peace!

"I will not attempt to comfort you and my dear Sisters. You
all feel, like me, how much we have lost; but you feel also
that Death alone could end these long sorrows. With our dear
Father it is now well; and we shall all follow him ere long.
Never shall the image of him fade from our hearts; and our
grief for him can only unite us still closer together.

"Five or six years ago it did not seem likely that you, my
dear ones, should, after such a loss, find a Friend in your
Brother,--that I should survive our dear Father. God has
ordered it otherwise; and He grants me the joy to feel that
I may still be something to you. How ready I am thereto, I
need not assure you. We all of us know one another in this
respect, and are our dear Father's not unworthy children."

This earnest and manful lamentation, which contains also a just
recognition of the object lamented, may serve to prove, think Saupe
and others, what is very evident, that Caspar Schiller, with his
stiff, military regulations, spirit of discipline and rugged, angular
ways, was, after all, the proper Father for a wide-flowing, sensitive,
enthusiastic, somewhat lawless Friedrich Schiller; and did
beneficently compress him into something of the shape necessary for
his task in this world.

II. THE MOTHER.

Of Schiller's Mother, Elisabetha Dorothea Kodweis, born at Marbach
1733, the preliminary particulars have been given above: That she was
the daughter of an Innkeeper, Woodmeasurer and Baker; prosperous in
the place when Schiller Senior first arrived there. We should have
added, what Saupe omits, that the young Surgeon boarded in their
house; and that by the term Woodmeasurer (_Holzmesser_, Measurer of
Wood) is signified an Official Person appointed not only to measure
and divide into portions the wood supplied as fuel from the Ducal or