The “Revolt of the Netherlands,” of which the first volume appeared in 1788, is accurate, vivid and coherent, and unites beauty to a calm force.  It happened that the professorship at the University of Jena was about to be vacant, and through Goethe’s solicitations Schiller was appointed to it in 1789.  In the February following he obtained the hand of Fraeulein Lengefeld.  “Life is quite a different thing by the side of a beloved wife,” he wrote a few months later; “the world again clothes itself around me in poetic forms.”

From His Settlement at Jena to His Death (1790-1805)

The duties of his new office called upon Schiller to devote himself with double zeal to history.  We have scarcely any notice of the plan or success of his academical prelections; his delivery was not distinguished by fluency or grace, but his matter, we suppose, would make amends for these deficiencies of manner.  His letters breathe a spirit not only of diligence but of ardour, and he was now busied with his “History of the Thirty-Years War.”  This work, published in 1791, is considered his chief historical treatise, for the “Revolt of the Netherlands” was never completed.  In Schiller’s view, the business of the historian is not merely to record, but also to interpret; his narrative should be moulded according to the science, and impregnated with the liberal spirit of his time.

In one of his letters he says—­“The problem is, to choose and arrange your materials so that, to interest, they shall not need the aid of decoration.  We moderns have a source of interest at our disposal, which no Greek or Roman was acquainted with, and which the patriotic interest does not nearly equal.  This last, in general, is chiefly of importance to unripe nations, for the youth of the world.  But we may excite a very different sort of interest if we represent each remarkable occurrence that happened to men as of importance to man.  It is a poor and little aim to write for one nation; the most powerful nation is but a fragment.”

In 1791, Schiller was overtaken by a violent and threatening disorder in the chest, and though nature overcame it in the present instance, the blessing of entire health never returned to him.  Total cessation from intellectual effort was prescribed to him, and his prospect was a hard one; but the hereditary Prince of Holstein-Augustenberg came to his assistance with a pension of a thousand crowns for three years, presented with a delicate politeness which touched Schiller even more than the gift itself.  He bore bodily pain with a strenuous determination and with an unabated zeal in the great business of his life.  No period of his life displayed more heroism than the present one.