rage, by the author of "Friends in Council."

"If greatness," he writes, "can be shut up in qualities, it will
be found to consist in courage and in openness of mind and soul.
These qualities may not seem at first to be so potent. But see
what _growth_ there is in them. The education of a man of open
mind is never ended. Then with openness of soul a man sees some
way into all other souls that come near him, feels with them, has
their experience, is in himself a people. Sympathy is the
universal solvent. Nothing is understood without it.... Add
courage to this openness, and you have a man who can own himself
in the wrong, can forgive, can trust, can adventure, can, in
short, use all the means that insight and sympathy endow him
with."

A plucky and warm-hearted boy, under the care of an honest, brave, and
intelligent father and a tender and religious mother,--this is all we know
and care to know about Schiller during the first ten years of his life. In
the year 1768 there begins a new period in the life of Schiller. His
father was settled at Ludwigsburg, the ordinary residence of the reigning
Duke of Wurtemberg, the Duke Charles. This man was destined to exercise a
decisive influence on Schiller's character. Like many German sovereigns in
the middle of the last century, Duke Charles of Wurtemberg had felt the
influence of those liberal ideas which had found so powerful an utterance
in the works of the French and English philosophers of the eighteenth
century. The philosophy which in France was smiled at by kings and
statesmen, while it roused the people to insurrection and regicide,
produced in Germany a deeper impression on the minds of the sovereigns and
ruling classes than of the people. In the time of Frederick the Great and
Joseph II. it became fashionable among sovereigns to profess Liberalism,
and to work for the enlightenment of the human race. It is true that this
liberal policy was generally carried out in a rather despotic way, and
people were emancipated and enlightened very much as the ancient Saxons
were converted by Charlemagne. We have an instance of this in the case of
Schiller. Duke Charles had founded an institution where orphans and the
sons of poor officers were educated free of expense. He had been informed
that young Schiller was a promising boy, and likely to reflect credit on
his new institution, and he proceeded without further inquiry to place