Scorn not the Fortune-favour’d, that to him
  The light-won victory by the gods is given,
  Or that, as Paris, from the strife severe,
  The Venus draws her darling,—­Whom the heaven
  So prospers, love so watches, I revere! 
  And not the man upon whose eyes, with dim
  And baleful night, sits Fate.  The Dorian lord,
  August Achilles, was not less divine
  That Vulcan wrought for him the shield and sword—­
  That round the mortal hover’d all the hosts
  Of all Olympus—­that his wrath to grace,
  The best and bravest of the Grecian race
  Fell by the Trojan steel, what time the ghosts
  Of souls untimely slain fled to the Stygian coasts.

  Scorn not the Beautiful—­if it be fair,
  And yet seem useless in thy human sight. 
  As scentless lilies in the loving air,
  Be they delighted—­thou in them delight. 
  If without use they shine, yet still the glow
  May thine own eyes enamour.  Oh rejoice
  That heaven the gifts of Song showers down below—­
  That what the muse hath taught him, the sweet voice
  Of the glad minstrel teaches thee!—­the soul
  Which the god breathes in him, he can bestow
  In turn upon the listener—­if his breast
  The blessing feel, thy heart is in that blessing blest.

  The busy mart let Justice still control,
  Weighing the guerdon to the toil!—­What then? 
  A god alone claims joy—­all joy is his,
  Flushing with unsought light the cheeks of men. 
  Where is no miracle, why there no bliss! 
  Grow, change, and ripen all that mortal be,
  Shapen’d from form to form, by toiling time;
  The Blissful and the Beautiful are born
  Full grown, and ripen’d from Eternity—­
  No gradual changes to their glorious prime,
  No childhood dwarfs them, and no age has worn.—­
  Like Heaven’s, each earthly Venus on the sight
  Comes, a dark birth, from out an endless sea;
  Like the first Pallas, in maturest might,
  Arm’d, from the Thunderer’s brow, leaps forth each Thought of Light.

* * * * *

We have now, with few exceptions, translated all the principal poems comprised in the third, or maturest period of Schiller’s life.  We here pass back to the poems of his youth.  The contrast in tone, thought, and spirit, between the compositions of the first and the third period, in the great poet’s intellectual career, is sufficiently striking.  In the former, there is little of that majestic repose of strength so visible in the latter; but there is infinitely more fire and action—­more of that lavish and exuberant energy which characterized the earlier tales of Lord Byron, and redeemed, in that wonderful master of animated and nervous style, a certain poverty of conception by a vigour and gusto of execution, which no English poet, perhaps, has ever surpassed.  In his poems lies the life, and beats the heart, of Schiller.  They conduct us