FA1432 HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY FROM THE LIBRARY OF Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1845, by JOHN WEISS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. BOSTON: PRINTED BY FREEMAN AND BOLLES, CONTENTS. 149 INTRODUCTION. We have lately fallen into the error, for which we are indebted to Germany herself, of forcing an unnatural contrast between Goethe and Schiller, her two greatest men. Scholars spend their ingenuity in drawing parallels and exposing differences, when the true process would be to construct an equation and indicate the points of contact. The error has now become almost irremediable: and it seems to be generally understood that the two men would have never lived together in Weimar, if Providence had not designed to puzzle posterity with the contrast, and to occupy its leisure moments with the debate as to which is the greater. They have unfortunately passed into history, with the legal versus between their names, which never kept asunder the Doe and Roe of fiction with a more abiding pertinacity. This is a great injury which we inflict upon ourselves. Undoubtedly, that delightful period of their common activity at Weimar affords the most natural opportunity for instituting a comparison between them, which is not without its interest and advantage. Their mental tendencies differed too distinctly to escape observation; perhaps they challenge it, and perhaps the two poets are noteworthy as successful exponents of the two great elements of Humanity, the Real and the Ideal. For neither was Goethe the whole man, nor was Schiller the less complete one, he has been represented. But it is in this very distinctness with which they developed respectively those two great elements, that we ought to discern, not only the special mission of each, but the still higher mission of both united. It is striking to notice how their diversity produces an unity; it would be instructive to analyze their characters, in order to perceive their capacity for creating a third character which is the idea of Humanity, the result of the two tendencies which make a man. It seems, then, as if that period of their artistic union was a lucky manœuvre of nature, to bring together her two elements most favorably developed, that she might "give the world assurance of a Man." Where |