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The minor poems of Schiller of the second and third periods
The minor poems of Schiller of the second and third periods Author:Friedrich Schiller Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POEMS OF THE THIRD PERIOD. IDEAL, DIDACTIC, EPIGRAMMATIC. 1795, 1796. £)a§ 5beal unb ba§ fiebetu OR THE REALM OF SHADOWS. An interval of seven yea... more »rs elapsed between the date of the latest compositions of the foregoing series, and that of the earliest of the present; and during this long period of suspense the Muse of Schiller appears to have been completely silent, except in some occasional works of translation. The change of life incident to his marriage and domestic establishment, and the duties of his Jena professorship requiring a long course of study to which he had hitherto been a stranger, and to which we owe his great historical works on the Revolution of the Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War, necessarily occupied his mind, during a considerable portion of this interval, to the exclusion of other objects; and his Philosophical speculations, especially those of the class to which German Literature has assigned the term of Esthetic, engrossed all the remaining time not consumed by attacks of that fatal and wasting disease which was destined to end both his labours and his life after ten years more had been added to his earthly existence. The first fruits of his return to Poetry are marked by the influence of his philosophical habits of thinking, to a degree which renders them sometimes almost unintelligible without the aid of a commentary, for which his various philosophical treatises furnish ample materials. The remarkable poem, for instance, which is here placed at the head of its division, is aptly designated by one of the Poet's latest critical Biographers as " the crowning garland "—die Blu- menkr'one—of his principal --Esthetic treatise—his Britfe iiber die asthetische Eniehung des Menschen. Its original title—Dai Reich der Schatten—which is here ...« less