power which should accompany it. Happily, death, or entire fatuity, at
length puts an end to such scenes of ignoble misery; which, however,
ignoble as they are, we ought to view with pity rather than contempt.

Such are frequently the fruits of protracted sickness, in men
otherwise of estimable qualities and gifts, but whose sensibility
exceeds their strength of mind. In Schiller, its worst effects were
resisted by the only availing antidote, a strenuous determination to
neglect them. His spirit was too vigorous and ardent to yield even in
this emergency: he disdained to dwindle into a pining valetudinarian;
in the midst of his infirmities, he persevered with unabated zeal in
the great business of his life. As he partially recovered, he returned
as strenuously as ever to his intellectual occupations; and often, in
the glow of poetical conception, he almost forgot his maladies. By
such resolute and manly conduct, he disarmed sickness of its cruelest
power to wound; his frame might be in pain, but his spirit retained
its force, unextinguished, almost unimpeded; he did not lose his
relish for the beautiful, the grand, or the good, in any of their
shapes; he loved his friends as formerly, and wrote his finest and
sublimest works when his health was gone. Perhaps no period of his
life displayed more heroism than the present one.

After this severe attack, and the kind provision which he had received
from Denmark, Schiller seems to have relaxed his connexion with the
University of Jena: the weightiest duties of his class appear to have
been discharged by proxy, and his historical studies to have been
forsaken. Yet this was but a change, not an abatement, in the activity
of his mind. Once partially free from pain, all his former diligence
awoke; and being also free from the more pressing calls of duty and
economy, he was now allowed to turn his attention to objects which
attracted it more. Among these one of the most alluring was the
Philosophy of Kant.

The transcendental system of the Koenigsberg Professor had, for the
last ten years, been spreading over Germany, which it had now filled
with the most violent contentions. The powers and accomplishments of
Kant were universally acknowledged; the high pretensions of his
system, pretensions, it is true, such as had been a thousand times put
forth, a thousand times found wanting, still excited notice, when so
backed by ability and reputation. The air of mysticism connected wi