its chief characteristics; they remind us of
the defective cultivation, as well as of the fervid and harassed
feelings of its author. Above all, the latter quality is visible; the
tragic interest of the _Robbers_ is deep throughout, so deep that
frequently it borders upon horror. A grim inexpiable Fate is made the
ruling principle: it envelops and overshadows the whole; and under
its louring influence, the fiercest efforts of human will appear but
like flashes that illuminate the wild scene with a brief and terrible
splendour, and are lost forever in the darkness. The unsearchable
abysses of man's destiny are laid open before us, black and profound
and appalling, as they seem to the young mind when it first attempts
to explore them: the obstacles that thwart our faculties and wishes,
the deceitfulness of hope, the nothingness of existence, are sketched
in the sable colours so natural to the enthusiast when he first
ventures upon life, and compares the world that is without him to the
anticipations that were within.

Karl von Moor is a character such as young poets always delight to
contemplate or delineate; to Schiller the analogy of their situations
must have peculiarly recommended him. Moor is animated into action by
feelings similar to those under which his author was then suffering
and longing to act. Gifted with every noble quality of manhood in
overflowing abundance, Moor's first expectations of life, and of the
part he was to play in it, had been glorious as a poet's dream. But
the minor dexterities of management were not among his endowments; in
his eagerness to reach the goal, he had forgotten that the course is a
labyrinthic maze, beset with difficulties, of which some may be
surmounted, some can only be evaded, many can be neither. Hurried on
by the headlong impetuosity of his temper, he entangles himself in
these perplexities; and thinks to penetrate them, not by skill and
patience, but by open force. He is baffled, deceived, and still more
deeply involved; but injury and disappointment exasperate rather than
instruct him. He had expected heroes, and he finds mean men; friends,
and he finds smiling traitors to tempt him aside, to profit by his
aberrations, and lead him onward to destruction: he had dreamed of
magnanimity and every generous principle, he finds that prudence is
the only virtue sure of its reward. Too fiery by nature, the intensity
of his sufferings has now maddened him still farther: he is hi