[Illustration:  MONUMENT TO SCHILLER (Berlin) Sculptor, Reinhold Begas]

On the 22d of February, 1790, Schiller was married to Lotte von Lengefeld, with whom he lived most happily the rest of his days.  His letters of this period tell of a quiet joy such as he had not known before.  And then, suddenly, his fair prospects were clouded by the disastrous breakdown of his health.  An attack of pneumonia in the winter of 1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he recovered from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse than the first.  He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went abroad that he was dead.  After a while he rallied, but never again to be strong and well.  From this time forth he must be thought of as a semi-invalid, doomed to a very cautious mode of living and expectant of an early death.  It was to be a fourteen years’ battle between a heroic soul and an ailing body.

For a while, owing to the forced cessation of the literary work on which his small income depended, he was in great distress for lack of money.  His wife, while of noble family, had brought nothing but herself to the marriage partnership.  And then, just as in the dark days at Mannheim in 1784, help seemed to come from the clouds.  Two Danish noblemen, ardent admirers quite unknown to him personally, heard of his painful situation and offered him a pension of a thousand thalers a year for three years.  No conditions whatever were attached to the gift; he was simply to follow his inclination, free from all anxiety about a livelihood.  Without hesitation he accepted the gift and thus found himself, for the first time in his life, really free to do as he chose.  What he chose was to use his freedom for a grapple with Kant’s philosophy.  Today this seems a strange choice for a sick poet, but let Schiller himself explain what lay in his mind.  He wrote to Koerner: 

“It is precisely for the sake of artistic creation that I wish to philosophize.  Criticism must repair the damage it has done me.  And it has done me great damage indeed; for I miss in myself these many years that boldness, that living fire, that was mine before I knew a rule.  Now I see myself in the act of creating and fashioning; I observe the play of inspiration, and my imagination works less freely, since it is conscious of being watched.  But if I once reach the point where artistic procedure becomes natural, like education for the well-nurtured man, then my fancy will get back its old freedom and know no bounds but those of its own making.”

From these words we understand the nature of Schiller’s enterprise—­he wished to fathom the laws of beauty.  It seemed to him that beauty could not be altogether a matter of changing taste, opinion, and fashion; that somehow or other it must be grounded in eternal laws either of the external world or of human nature.  He felt, too, that a knowledge of these laws, could it once become second nature,