Schlegel’s own pursuits as a student were prevailingly in the field of Hellenism, in which his acquisitions were astounding; his influence was especially potent in giving a philological character to much of the work of the Romanticists.  In Goettingen he became acquainted with one of the most gifted women which Germany has ever produced, Caroline, the daughter of the Goettingen professor Michaelis, at the time a young widow in the home of her father, and destined to become not only his wife, but the Muse of much of his most important work.  This office she performed until the time of their unfortunate separation.

After finishing his university studies, Wilhelm was for a while private tutor in a wealthy family at Amsterdam, where conditions of living were most agreeable, but where a suitable stimulus to the inborn life of his mind was lacking.  He accordingly gave up this position and returned, with little but hopes, to Germany.  Then came a call which was both congenial and honorable.  Schiller’s attention had been drawn, years before, to a review of his own profound philosophical poem, The Artists, by an unknown young man, whom he at once sought to secure as a regular contributor to his literary journal, The New Thalia.  Nothing came of this, chiefly because of Schlegel’s intimate relations to Buerger at the time.  Schiller had published, not long before, his annihilatory review of Buerger’s poems, which did so much to put that poet out of serious consideration for the remainder of his days.  In the meantime Schiller had addressed himself to his crowning enterprise, the establishing of a literary journal which should be the final dictator of taste and literary criticism throughout the German-speaking world.  In 1794 the plan for The Hours was realized under favorable auspices, and in the same year occurred the death of Buerger.  In 1796 Schiller invited Wilhelm to become one of the regular staff of The Hours, and this invitation Schlegel accepted, finding in it the opportunity to marry Caroline, with whom he settled in Jena in July of that year.  His first contribution to The Hours was a masterful and extended treatise on Dante, which was accompanied by translations which were clearly the most distinguished in that field which the German language had ever been able to offer.  Schlegel also furnished elaborated poems, somewhat in Schiller’s grand style, for the latter’s Almanac of the Muses.  During the years of his residence at Jena (which continued until 1801) Schlegel, with the incalculable assistance of his wife, published the first eight volumes of those renderings of Shakespeare’s plays into German which doubtless stand at the very summit of the art of transferring a poet to an alien region, and which have, in actual fact, served to make the Bard of Avon as truly a fellow-citizen of the Germans as of the Britons.  Wilhelm’s brother Friedrich had remained but a year with him in Jena, before his