Especially great is my longing to enjoy some poetical works
in common with you.

[Illustration: Schiller on Goethe]

You promised to let me hear some of your epigrams when an opportunity
occurred. It would be a great and additional pleasure to me if this
could be done during your approaching visit to Jena, as it is still
very uncertain when I may be able to get to W.

Just as I am about to close comes the welcome continuation of your
_Meister_. A thousand thanks for it!

* * * * *

GOETHE _to_ SCHILLER

Weimar, November 21, 1795.

Today I received twenty-one of Propertius' elegies from Knebel and
shall look them over carefully and then let the translator know where
I find anything to object to; for, as he has given himself so much
trouble, nothing ought, perhaps, to be altered without his sanction.

I wish you could induce Cotta to pay for this manuscript at once; it
could easily be calculated how many sheets it would print. I have, it
is true, no actual occasion to ask this, but it would look much
better, would encourage energetic cooeperation, and also help in making
the good name of the _Horen_ better known. A publisher has often
enough to pay money in advance, so Cotta might surely once in a way
pay upon the receipt of a manuscript. Knebel wants the Elegies to be
divided into three contributions; I, too, think this the right
proportion, and we should thus have the first three numbers of next
year's _Horen_ nicely adorned. I will see to it that you get them in
proper time.

Have you seen Stolberg's abominable preface to his Platonic
discourses? The disclosures he there makes are so insipid and
intolerable that I feel very much inclined to step out and chastise
him. It would be a very simple matter to hold up to view the senseless
unreasonableness of this stupid set of people, if, in so doing, one
had but a rational public on one's side; this would at the same time
be a declaration of war against that superficiality which it has now
become necessary to combat in every department of learning. The secret
feuds of suppressing, misplacing, and misprinting, which it has
carried on against us, have long deserved that this declaration should
be held in honorable remembrance, and that continuously.

I find this doubly necessary and unavoidable in the case of my
scientific works, which I am gradually getting into order. I intend to
speak out my mind pretty frankly against reviewers,