igher Hand; and could trustfully
expect the workings of the same. Besides, her Son clung so tenderly to
her, that at least there was no separation of him from the Mother's
heart to be dreaded. The heart-warm attachment of childish years to
the creed taught him by his Mother might, and did, vanish; but not the
attachment to his Mother herself whose dear image often enough charmed
back the pious sounds and forms of early days, and for a time scared
away doubts and unbelief.

'Years came and went; and Schiller, at last, about the end of 1780,
stept out of the Academy, into the actual world, which he as yet knew
only by hearsay. Delivered from that long unnatural constraint of body
and spirit, he gave free course to his fettered inclinations; and
sought, as in Poetry so also in Life, unlimited freedom! The tumults
of passion and youthful buoyancy, after so long an imprisonment, had
their sway; and embarrassments in money, their natural consequence,
often brought him into very sad moods.

'In this season of time, so dangerous for the moral purity of the
young man, his Mother again was his good Genius; a warning and
request, in her soft tone of love sufficed to recall youthful levity
within the barriers again, and restore the balance. She anxiously
contrived, too, that the Son, often and willingly, visited his
Father's house. Whenever Schiller had decided to give himself a good
day, he wandered out with some friend as far as Solituede.' (Only some
four or five miles.) '"What a baking and a roasting then went on by
that good soul," says one who witnessed it, "for the dear Prodigy of a
Son and the comrade who had come with him; for whom the good Mother
never could do enough! Never have I seen a better maternal heart, a
more excellent, more domestic, more womanly woman."

'The admiring recognition which the Son had already found among his
youthful friends, and in wider circles, was no less grateful to her
heart than the gradual perception that his powerful soul, welling
forth from the interior to the outward man, diffused itself into his
very features, and by degrees even advantageously altered the
curvatures and the form of his body. His face about this time got rid
of its freckles and irregularities of skin; and strikingly improved,
moreover, by the circumstance that the hitherto rather drooping nose
gradually acquired its later aquiline form. And withal, the youthful
Poet, with the growing consciousness of his strength and