y to speak with certain visitors. One of
these, as we have said above, was Schiller. That Schubart, in their
single interview, was pleased with the enthusiastic friendly boy, we
could have conjectured, and he has himself informed us. 'Excepting
Schiller,' said the veteran garreteer, in writing afterwards to Gleim,
'I scarcely know of any German youth in whom the sacred spark of
genius has mounted up within the soul like flame upon the altar of a
Deity. We are fallen into the shameful times, when women bear rule
over men; and make the toilet a tribunal before which the most
gigantic minds must plead. Hence the stunted spirit of our poets;
hence the dwarf products of their imagination; hence the frivolous
witticism, the heartless sentiment, crippled and ricketed by soups,
ragouts and sweetmeats, which you find in fashionable balladmongers.'

Time and hours wear out the roughest day. The world began to feel an
interest in Schubart, and to take some pity on him: his songs and
poems were collected and published; their merit and their author's
misery exhibited a shocking contrast. His Highness of Wuertemberg at
length condescended to remember that a mortal, of wants and feelings
like his own, had been forced by him to spend, in sorrow and inaction,
the third part of an ordinary lifetime; to waste, and worse than
waste, ten years of precious time; time, of which not all the dukes
and princes in the universe could give him back one instant. He
commanded Schubart to be liberated; and the rejoicing Editor
(unacquitted, unjudged, unaccused!) once more beheld the blue zenith
and the full ring of the horizon. He joined his wife at Stuttgard, and
recommenced his newspaper. The _Deutsche Chronik_ was again popular;
the notoriety of its conductor made amends for the decay which critics
did not fail to notice in his faculties. Schubart's sufferings had in
fact permanently injured him; his mind was warped and weakened by
theosophy and solitude; bleak northern vapours often flitted over it,
and chilled its tropical luxuriance. Yet he wrote and rhymed;
discoursed on the corruption of the times, and on the means of their
improvement. He published the first portion of his Life, and often
talked amazingly about the Wandering Jew, and a romance of which he
was to form the subject. The idea of making old _Joannes a
temporibus_, the 'Wandering,' or as Schubart's countrymen denominate
him the 'Eternal Jew,' into a novel hero, was a mighty favouri