Trust not the roses which your youth enjoyeth,
      Sisters, to man’s faith, changeful as the moon! 
    Beauty to me brought guilt—­its bloom destroyeth: 
      Lo, in the judgment court I curse the boon: 
    Tears in the headsman’s gaze—­what tears?—­tis spoken! 
      Quick, bind mine eyes—­all soon shall be forgot—­
    Doomsman—­the lily hast thou never broken? 
      Pale doomsman—­tremble not!

    [12] “Und Empfindung soll mein Richtschwert seyn.”  A line of
    great vigour in the original, but which, if literally
    translated, would seem extravagant in English.

    [13] Joseph, in the original.

[The poem we have just concluded was greatly admired at the time of its first publication, and it so far excels in art most of the earlier efforts by the author, that it attains one of the highest secrets in true pathos.  It produces interest for the criminal while creating terror for the crime.  This, indeed, is a triumph in art never achieved but by the highest genius.  The inferior writer, when venturing upon the grandest stage of passion, (which unquestionably exists in the delineation of great guilt as of heroic virtue,) falls into the error either of gilding the crime in order to produce sympathy for the criminal, or, in the spirit of a spurious morality, of involving both crime and criminal in a common odium.  It is to discrimination between the doer and the deed, that we owe the sublimest revelations of the human heart:  in this discrimination lies the key to the emotions produced by the Oedipus and Macbeth.  In the brief poem before us a whole drama is comprehended.  Marvellous is the completeness of the pictures it presents—­its mastery over emotions the most opposite—­its fidelity to nature in its exposition of the disordered and despairing mind in which tenderness becomes cruelty, and remorse for error tortures itself into scarce conscious crime.

But the art employed, though admirable of its kind, still falls short of the perfection which, in his later works, Schiller aspired to achieve, viz. the point at which Pain ceases.  The tears which Tragic Pathos, when purest and most elevated, calls forth, ought not to be tears of pain.  In the ideal world, as Schiller has inculcated, even sorrow should have its charm—­all that harrows, all that revolts, belongs but to that inferior school in which Schiller’s fiery youth formed itself for nobler grades—­the school “of Storm and Pressure”—­(Stuerm und Draeng—­as the Germans have expressively described it.) If the reader will compare Schiller’s poem of the ‘Infanticide,’ with the passages which represent a similar crime in the Medea, (and the author of ‘Wallenstein’ deserves comparison even with Euripides,) he will see the distinction between the art that seeks an elevated emotion, and the art which is satisfied with creating an intense one.  In Euripides, the detail—­the reality—­all that