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.  In the last, as Julian Schmidt says, the ever varying scenery is made a ‘frame for a kind of phenomenology of mankind.’

    Flowers of all hue are struggling into glow
  Along the blooming fields; yet their sweet strife
  Melts into one harmonious concord.  Lo! 
  The path allures me through the pastoral green
  And the wide world of fields!  The labouring bee
  Hums round me, and on hesitating wing
  O’er beds of purple clover, quiveringly
  Hovers the butterfly.  Save these, all life
  Sleeps in the glowing sunlight’s steady sheen—­
  E’en from the west no breeze the lull’d airs bring. 
  Hark! in the calm aloft I hear the skylark sing. 
  The thicket rustles near, the alders bow
  Down their green coronals, and as I pass,
  Waves in the rising wind the silvering grass;
  Come! day’s ambrosial night! receive me now
  Beneath the roof by shadowy beeches made
  Cool-breathing, etc.

Schiller’s interest in Nature was more a matter of reflection than direct observation; its real tendency was philosophical and ethical.  He called Nature naive (he included naturalness in Nature); those who seek her, sentimental; but he overlooked (as we saw in an earlier chapter) the fact that antiquity did not always remain naive, and that not all moderns are sentimental.

As Rousseau’s pupil he drew a sharp distinction between Nature and Art, and felt happy in solitude where ’man with his torment does not come,’ lying, as he says in The Bride of Messina, like a child on the bosom of Nature.