Besides composing dramatic pieces and training players, Schiller wrote poems, the products of a mind brooding over dark and mysterious things, and his “Philosophic Letters” unfold to us many a gloomy conflict of the soul, surveying the dark morass of infidelity yet showing no causeway through it.  The first acts of “Don Carlos,” printed in “Thalia,” had attracted the attention of the Duke of Sachsen-Weimar, who conferred on their author the title of Counsellor.  Schiller was loved and admired in Manheim, yet he longed for a wider sphere of action, and he determined to take up his residence at Leipzig.

Here he arrived in March, 1785, and at once made innumerable acquaintances, but went to Dresden in the end of the summer, and here “Don Carlos” was completed.  This, the story of a royal youth condemned to death by his father, is the first of Schiller’s plays to bear the stamp of maturity.  The Spanish court in the sixteenth century; its rigid, cold formalities; its cruel, bigoted, but proud-spirited grandees; its inquisitors and priests; and Philip, its head, the epitome at once of its good and bad qualities, are exhibited with wonderful distinctness and address.  Herr Schiller’s genius does not thrill, but exalts us; it is impetuous, exuberant, majestic.  The tragedy was, received with immediate and universal approbation.

He now contemplated no further undertaking connected with the stage, but his mind was overflowing with the elements of poetry, and with these smaller pieces he occupied himself at intervals through the remainder of his life.  “The Walk,” the “Song of the Bell,” contain exquisite delineations of the fortunes of man; the “Cranes of Ibycus,” and “Hero and Leander,” are among the most moving ballads in any language.  Schiller never wrote or thought with greater diligence than while at Dresden.  A novel, “The Ghostseer,” was a great popular success, but Schiller had begun to think of history.  Very few of his projects in this direction reached even partial execution; portions of a “History of the Most Remarkable Conspiracies and Revolutions in the Middle and Later Ages,” and of a “History of the Revolt of the Netherlands,” were published.

A visit to Weimar, the Athens of Germany, was accomplished in 1787; to Goethe he was not introduced, but was welcomed by Wieland and Herder.  Thence he went to see his early patroness at Bauerbach, and on this journey, at Rudolstadt, he met the Fraeulein Lengefeld, whose attractions made him loath to leave and eager to return.  The visit was repeated next year, and this lady honoured him with a return of love.  At this time, too, he first met the illustrious Goethe, whom we may contrast with Schiller as we should contrast Shakespeare with Milton.  Goethe was now in his thirty-ninth year, Schiller ten years younger, and each affected the other with feelings of estrangement, almost of repugnance.  Ultimately they liked each other better, and became friends; there are few things on which Goethe should look back with greater pleasure than on his treatment of Schiller.