that interests me has
already had its epoch with him; his world is not my world." Goethe had
expressed the same feeling. He saw Schiller occupying the very position
which he himself had given up as untenable; he saw his powerful genius
carrying out triumphantly "those very paradoxes, moral and dramatic, from
which he was struggling to get liberated." "No union," as Goethe writes,
"was to be dreamt of. Between two spiritual antipodes there was more
intervening than a simple diameter of the spheres. Antipodes of that sort
act as a kind of poles, which can never coalesce." How the first approach
between these two opposite poles took place Goethe has himself described,
in a paper entitled "Happy Incidents." But no happy incident could have
led to that glorious friendship, which stands alone in the literary
history of the whole world, if there had not been on the part of Schiller
his warm sympathy for all that is great and noble, and on the part of
Goethe a deep interest in every manifestation of natural genius. Their
differences on almost every point of art, philosophy, and religion, which
at first seemed to separate them forever, only drew them more closely
together, when they discovered in each other those completing elements
which produced true harmony of souls. Nor is it right to say that Schiller
owes more to Goethe than Goethe to Schiller. If Schiller received from
Goethe the higher rules of art and a deeper insight into human nature,
Goethe drank from the soul of his friend the youth and vigor, the purity
and simplicity, which we never find in any of Goethe's works before his
"Hermann and Dorothea." And, as in most friendships, it was not so much
Goethe as he was, but Goethe as reflected in his friend's soul, who
henceforth became Schiller's guide and guardian. Schiller possessed the
art of admiring, an art so much more rare than the art of criticising. His
eye was so absorbed in all that was great, and noble, and pure, and high
in Goethe's mind, that he could not, or would not, see the defects in his
character. And Goethe was to Schiller what he was to no one else. He was
what Schiller believed him to be; afraid to fall below his friend's ideal,
he rose beyond himself until that high ideal was reached, which only a
Schiller could have formed. Without this regenerating friendship it is
doubtful whether some of the most perfect creations of Goethe and Schiller
would ever have been called into existence.

We saw Schille