LITERAL TRANSLATION

Alas! for those who place their confidence on thee, against thee lean the secure hut of their happiness, allured by thy hospitable form.  Suddenly, unexpectedly, in a moment still as night, there is a fermentation in the treacherous gulf of fire; it discharges itself with raging force, and away over all the plantations of men drives the wild stream in frightful devastation.—­WALLENSTEIN.  Thou art portraying thy father’s heart; as thou describest, even so is it shaped in his entrails, in this black hypocrite’s breast.  O, the art of hell has deceived me!  The Abyss sent up to me the most spotted of the spirits, the most skilful in lies, and placed him as a friend by my side.  Who may withstand the power of hell?  I took the basilisk to my bosom, with my heart’s blood I nourished him; he sucked himself glutfull at the breasts of my love.  I never harbored evil toward him; wide open did I leave the door of my thoughts; I threw away the key of wise foresight.  In the starry heaven, etc.—­We find a difficulty in believing this to have been written by Schiller.]

[Footnote 29: 
  This is a poor and inadequate translation of the affectionate simplicity
  of the original—­

  Sie alle waren Fremdlinge; Du warst
  Das Kind des Hauses.

Indeed the whole speech is in the best style of Massinger. O si sic omnia!]

[Footnote 30:  It appears that the account of his conversion being caused by such a fall, and other stories of his juvenile character, are not well authenticated.]

[Footnote 31:  We doubt the propriety of putting so blasphemous a statement in the mouth of any character.—­T.]

[Footnote 32:  This soliloquy, which, according to the former arrangement; constituted the whole of Scene IX., and concluded the Fourth Act, is omitted in all the printed German editions.  It seems probable that it existed in the original manuscript from which Mr. Coleridge translated.—­Ed.]

[Footnote 33:  The soliloquy of Thekla consists in the original of six-and-twenty lines, twenty of which are in rhymes of irregular recurrence.  I thought it prudent to abridge it.  Indeed the whole scene between Thekla and Lady Neubrunn might, perhaps have been omitted without injury to the play.—­C.]

[Footnote 34:  These four lines are expressed in the original with exquisite felicity—­

  Am Himmel ist geschaeftige Bewegung. 
  Des Thurmes Fahne jagt der Wind, schnell geht
  Der Wolken Zug, die Mondessichel wankt,
  Und durch die Nacht zuckt ungewisse Helle.

The word “moon-sickle,” reminds me of a passage in Harris, as quoted by Johnson, under the word “falcated.”  “The enlightened part of the moon appears in the form of a sickle or reaping-hook, which is while she is moving from the conjunction to the opposition, or from the new moon to the full:  but from full to a new again, the enlightened part appears gibbous, and the dark falcated.”