Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 7.djvu/170

 120 ARTISTS AND AUTHORS " Thalia," and the numberless ideas for fresh romance with which his brain was teeming, would have broken down most men ; but though he repined at reverses, he rose continually superior to them. Long before " Don Carlos " was finished he commenced " The Ghostseer," in which he intended to develop an idea which had originally formed the scheme of " Friedrich Imhof." His life was a kind of fever ; with his ardent friendships, his susceptible passions, his pecuniary anxieties, and his fertile brain forever at work, he knew no rest. He had removed to Jena, the capital of Saxe-Weimar, and at that time the literary centre of Germany. The Prince Charles Augustus and his famous mother, the Princess Amalia, made him welcome and encouraged him. A gleam of sunshine now shone upon him ; and he saw a prospect of domestic happiness. He fell in love with Charlotte von Lengenfeld, and in 1789 they were engaged. On February 22, 1790, the fond couple were married at the little village church of Wenigen-Jena. It was a sim- ple wedding. " We spent the evening in quiet talk over our tea," wrote Lotte, sixteen years after, when she was a widow. It was a happy union, and the honeymoon was short, for Schiller had no time for idleness. This year he wrote his " History of the Thirty Years' War," and had the satisfaction of hearing it highly praised in influential quarters. He had never enjoyed such happiness as now, his only sorrow in the early months of his marriage arising from a brief separation from his wife, who had to go to Rudolstadt for her mother's birth- day. In one of his letters to her he says, " Your dear picture is ever before me ; all seems to speak to me of where the little wife walked, and My Lady Corn- fort " (Lotte's sister, Caroline) " sat enthroned. And to feel that my hand can always reach what my heart would have near it, to feel that we are inseparable, that is a sense which I unceasingly foster in my bosom, finding it exhaustless and ever new." Recognition of his genius came from all sides, from Goethe, Wieland, Korner ; and by the press he was hailed as the Shakespeare of Ger- many He needed some such encouragement, for he was attacked by a danger- ous illness, which was aggravated by pecuniary troubles ; had it not been for his wife's tender care he could scarcely have recovered, and it was well for him and for his country that there came to him at this crisis an offer from the Hereditary Prince and Count von Schimmelmann, of a thousand thalers per annum for three years, in order that he might obtain the rest needed for his restoration to health. "I am freed for a long time," he wrote joyfully to his dear friend Korner, " per- haps forever, from all care." To the generous donor he said, " I have to pay my debt, not to you, but to mankind. That is the common altar where you lay down your gifts and I my gratitude." The method he adopted to recruit his health was to begin to work again. The French National Assembly conferred upon several celebrated foreigners the right of citizenship, and at this distance of time it is strange to read the name of the German Schiller among them. Though seldom free from suffering, which was frequently so acute that he spoke of it as torture, it was a proof of his indomitable spirit that during his last decade he achieved his most memorable triumphs ; and yet, in the height of his powers, his