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Abschied vom Leser. 1795.

FAREWELL TO THE READER.

THIS "Farewell Address to the Reader" was first printed at the conclusion of the Musenalmanach for 1796. The date of its composition therefore probably belongs to the year preceding; but it has been thought to apply so well to the whole of this first division of Schiller's poems as to demand the transfer of it to the present place in the collection.

THE Muse is silent: and with maiden shame, Heightening the damask of her blushing cheek, She steps before thee, thine award to claim.

She feels its worth, yet dreads not to bespeak. She courts the praise of every honour'd name

That truth excites, and Flattery dares not seek ; And only He may crown her, in whose breast THE BEAUTIFUL resides a constant guest.

I may not hope these lays will longer live
Than till their tones some genial heart rejoice,
To fancy's eye new forms of Beauty give,
And hallow Feeling to a loftier choice.
No distant Future their prerogative,

Time only echoes to their tuneful voice;
Born for the moment 'midst Idalian bowers,
They join the light dance of the flying hours.

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Awaken'd Spring in Earth's warm lap renews— The buds of life she, joyous, scatters round. The air embalms each grove with nectar dews; The minstrel choir from Heaven's glad roofs resound;

And young and old his silent path pursues,

Sooth'd by sweet influences of sight and sound. Spring flies again-their seeds the flowrets shedAnd none remains of all that hither sped.

SCHILLER'S LYRICAL POEMS.

PART THE SECOND.

during the short residue of his earthly existence, by his Mary of Scotland, his Maid of Orleans, his William Tell, and his Bride af Messina, it will not be thought without reason that the same date has been chosen as the boundary line between the two great divisions of his Lyrical Poetry.

Der Taucher.

THIS ballad of "The Diver" is already so familiar to English Readers through the medium of several translations, of different degrees of fidelity and merit, (among the best of which I need hardly specify that of my friend Mr. Impey, in the first volume of his " Illustrations of German Poetry,") as to render any lengthened commentary superfluous. Whether the story, as related by Athanasius Kircher in his "Mundus Subterraneus," has reference to the times of Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, who was dethroned in 1501, or to those of one of the earlier Fredericks of the house of Arragon, who were kings of Sicily only, is a question in which probably few persons will now feel much interest; but the reckless barbarity of the prince who, for the gratification of a mere temporary caprice of fancy, sacrifices a young and gallant vassal, by requiring of him a second plunge into the whirlpool from which he had just escaped by little short of a miracle, affords too forcible and happy an illustration of the abuses of absolute power to have required, in the mind of the poet, any of those extenuating circumstances or motives which a late critic has suggested as calculated to bring the deed more within the sphere of common humanity.

The character of the self-devoted victim is precisely that which Schiller delighted to portray-in a single word, the Heroic. The force of contrast was never more strikingly exhibited than in that between despotic Tyranny and implicit Obedience-an abstract image of the Feudal Prin

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ciple. The sublimity of the conception consists in the struggle of human nature with mere physical force, in which light it may be considered as an illustration of Schiller's own treatise, Vom Erhabenen. Those ingredients of the Sublime which consist in Loneliness, Secresy, Darkness, Indefiniteness, are all to be found here united, as we sometimes meet them in Homer, in the poems ascribed to Ossian, and occasionally in our own Milton and Shakspeare, whose celebrated description of a drowning man in a dream of Clarence will immediately occur to the Reader-perhaps also with some doubt whether the brief concentration of that magnificent picture-suggesting merely to the imagination those ideas which Schiller has so minutely elaborated-does not furnish a decisive proof of the superiority of Shakspeare's universal genius.

The correspondence of Schiller with Goëthe, who was himself at the same time occupied with his romance of The Bayadére, contains some very curious evidence as to the pains taken in the composition of this Poem, and the sources to which the Poet resorted for the particulars so artificially embodied in its execution.

Ho, knights and esquires! whom have ye so bold
In yon whirlpool's wild eddies to leap?
See-I cast therein a goblet of gold-
Already 'tis whelm'd in the swarthy deep;
Now whoso will bring it again to me,
Shall win it and keep it—a well-earn'd fee."-

King Frederic look'd round on his vassals true,
Then turn'd to the cliff's o'erhanging side;
And full from the summit the goblet he threw
Into Charybdis' howling tide.

"Now where is the gallant-I rede you again,
Will plunge for his guerdon in yonder main ?"

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