“I have read, devoured, bent my knee; and my heart, my tears, my rushing blood, have paid ecstatic homage to your spirit, to your heart.  Oh, more!  Soon, soon more!  Pages, scraps—­whatever you can send.  I tender heart and hand to your genius.  What a work!  What wealth, power, poetic beauty, and irresistible force!  God keep you!  Amen.”

With Tell off his hands Schiller next threw his tireless energy on a Russian subject—­the story of Dmitri, reputed son of Ivan the Terrible.  The reading, note-taking and planning proved a long laborious task, and there were many interruptions.  In November, 1804, the hereditary Prince of Weimar brought home a Russian bride, Maria Paulovna, and for her reception he wrote The Homage of the Arts—­a slight affair which served its purpose well.  The reaction from these Russophil festivities left him in a weakened condition, and, feeling unequal to creative effort, he translated Racine’s Phedre into German verse, finishing it in February, 1805.  Then he returned with great zest to his Russian play Demetrius, of which enough was written to indicate that it might have become his masterpiece.  But the flame had burnt itself out.  Toward the end of April he took a cold which led to a violent fever with delirium.  The end came on May 9, 1805.

[Illustration:  SCHILLER AT THE COURT OF WEIMAR]

No attempt can here be made at a general estimate of Schiller’s dramatic genius.  The serious poetic drama, such as he wrote in his later years, is no longer in favor anywhere.  In Germany, as in our own land, the temper of the time is on the whole hostile to that form of art.  We demand, very properly, a drama attuned to the life of the present; one occupied, as we say, with living issues.  Yet Schiller is very popular on the German stage.  After the lapse of a century, and notwithstanding the fact that he seems to speak to us from the clouds, he holds his own.  Why is this?  It is partly because of a quality of his art that has been called his “monumental fresco-painting”; that is, his strong and luminous portraiture of the great historic forces that have shaped the destiny of nations.  These forces are matters of the spirit, of the inner life; and they persist from age to age, but little affected by the changing fashion of the theatre.  The reader of Schiller soon comes to feel that he deals with issues that are alive because they are immortal.

Another important factor in his classicity is the suggestion that goes out from his idealized personality.  German sentiment has set him on a high pedestal and made a hero of him, so that his word is not exactly as another man’s word.  Something of this was felt by those about him even in his lifetime.  Says Karoline von Wolzogen:  “High seriousness and the winsome grace of a pure and noble soul were always present in Schiller’s conversation; in listening to him one walked as among the changeless stars of heaven and the flowers of earth.”