...
Que sous nos doigts puissans exhale la nature,
Cette immense clavier!
His lyrics are rich in fine scenes from Nature, unrolled in cold but
stately periods, and the poetic intuition which always divines the
spirit life brought him near to that pantheism which we find in all
the greatest English and German poets of his time,[16] and which lay,
too, at the root of German romanticism.
THE GERMAN ROMANTICISTS
Schiller did not possess the intrinsically lyrical genius of Goethe;
his strength lay, not in song, but drama, and in a didactic form of
epic--the song not of feeling, but of thought.
Descriptions of Nature occur here and there in his epics and dramas;
but his feeling for her was chiefly theoretic. Like his
contemporaries, he passed through a sentimental period; _Evening_
shews this, and _Melancholy, to Laura_:
Laura, a sunrise seems to break
Where'er thy happy looks may glow....
Thy soul--a crystal river passing,
Silver clear and sunbeam glassing,
Mays into blossom sad autumn by thee:
Night and desert, if they spy thee,
To gardens laugh--with daylight shine,
Lit by those happy smiles of thine!
With such ecstatic extravagances contrast the excellent descriptions
of Nature full of objective life in his longer poems--for instance,
the tumult of Charybdis and the unceasing rain in _The Diver_,
evening in _The Hostage_, and landscape in _William Tell_ and _The
Walk_.
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