Page:Goethe and Schiller's Xenions (IA goetheschillersx00goetiala).pdf/22

 It is well known what good friends Goethe and Schiller were. After the two great poets had become personally acquainted they inspired, criticised, and corrected each other. Their common ideal became the firm basis of their mutual friendship, and the chief monument of their alliance is the collection of satirical distichs known as the Xenions.

Great though Schiller and Goethe were, they did not find sufficient support among those who should have been their first followers and disciples. The men of literary callings, who should be the priests of the holiest interests of humanity, were too envious fully to recognize and acknowledge the merit of these two great poet-thinkers. Moreover, the men of letters were chiefly enamoured of their own traditional methods of literary production and could not appreciate the purity, the grandeur, and the holiness of the new taste. They misunderstood the progressive spirit of the time, and to their puny minds the rise of the new era appeared as a mere disturbance of their traditional habits. They looked upon the twin giants of the world of thought as