ers of your genius will be double gainers. In
the number of the _Thalia_ which I herewith send you, you will find
some ideas of Koerner's on Declamation, which, I think, will please
you.

* * * * *

SCHILLER _to_ GOETHE

Jena, January 7, 1795.

Accept my best thanks for the copy of the novel you have sent me. The
feeling which penetrates and takes hold of me with increasing force
the further I read on in this work, I cannot better express in words
than by calling it a delicious, inward sense of comfort, a feeling of
mental and bodily well-being, and I will vouch that this will be the
effect produced upon all readers.

This sense of comfort I account for from the calm clearness,
smoothness, and transparency which pervade the whole of your work, and
which leave nothing to disturb or to dissatisfy the mind, and the mind
is not more excited than is necessary to fan and maintain a joyous
life. Of the individual parts I shall say nothing till I have seen the
Third Book, which I am looking forward to with longing.

I cannot express to you what a painful feeling it often is to me to
pass from a work of this kind into one of a philosophical character.
In the former all is so joyous, so alive, so harmoniously evolved, and
so true to human life; in the latter all is so stern, so rigid,
abstract, and so extremely unnatural; for all nature is synthesis, and
philosophy but antithesis. I can, in fact, give proof of having been
as true to nature in my speculations as is compatible with the idea of
analysis; indeed, I have perhaps been more faithful to her than our
Kantians would consider permissible or possible. But still I am no
less fully conscious of the infinite difference between Life and
Reasoning, and cannot, in such melancholy moments, help perceiving a
want in my own nature which in happier hours I am forced to think of
only as a natural duality of the thing itself. This much, however, is
certain--the poet is the only true man, and the best philosopher is
but a caricature in comparison with him.

I need scarcely assure you that I am in the utmost anxiety to know
what you have to say to my philosophy of the Beautiful. As the
Beautiful itself is derived from man as a whole, so my analysis of it
is drawn from _my_ own whole being, and I cannot but be deeply
interested in knowing how this accords with yours.

Your presence here will be a source of nourishment both to my mind and
my heart.