portion to their natural
dispositions to faith and veneration. With them, it comes from keen
sympathy with undeserved sufferings--from wrath at wickedness
triumphant--from too intense a brooding over the great mysteries
involved in the government of the world. Scepticism of this nature can
but little injure the frivolous, and will be charitably regarded by the
wise. Schiller's mind soon outgrew the state which, to the mind of a
poet, above all men, is most ungenial, but the sadness which the
struggle bequeathed, seems to have wrought a complete revolution in all
his preconceived opinions. The wild creator of the "_Robbers_," drunk
with liberty, and audacious against all restraint, becomes the champion
of "Holy Order,"--the denouncer of the French republic--the extoller of
an Ideal Life, which should entirely separate Genius the Restless from
Society the Settled. And as his impetuous and stormy vigour matured into
the lucent and tranquil art of "_Der Spaziergang_," "_Wallenstein_," and
"_Die Braut von Messina_," so his philosophy threw itself into calm
respect for all that custom sanctioned, and convention hallowed.

But even during the painful transition, of which, in his minor poems,
glimpses alone are visible, Scepticism, with Schiller, never insults the
devoted, or mocks the earnest mind. It may have sadness--but never
scorn. It is the question of a traveller who has lost his way in the
great wilderness, but who mourns with his fellow-seekers, and has no
bitter laughter for their wanderings from the goal. This division
begins, indeed, with a Hymn which atones for whatever pains us in the
two whose strain and spirit so gloomily contrast it, viz. the matchless
and immortal "_Hymn to Joy_"--a poem steeped in the very essence of
all-loving and all-aiding, Christianity--breathing the enthusiasm of
devout yet gladsome adoration, and ranking amongst the most glorious
bursts of worship which grateful Genius ever rendered to the benign
Creator.

And it is peculiarly noticeable, that, whatever Schiller's state of mind
upon theological subjects at the time that this hymn was composed, and
though all doctrinal stamp and mark be carefully absent from it, it is
yet a poem that never could have been written but in a Christian age, in
a Christian land--but by a man whose whole soul and heart had been at
one time (nay, _was_ at the very moment of composition) inspired and
suffused with that firm belief in God's goodness and His just