11, 12. _And as all things have pleased me, I am pleased with myself_, i.e., the sum total of my life is good. SCHILLER Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg, November 10, 1759. His short life was one great heroic struggle. His first inclination was to study for the ministry, but the rigorous and arbitrary discipline of the Duke Karl Eugen, whose school the boy as the son of an officer had to enter, considered neither aptitude nor desire, and thus Schiller had to study medicine and become an army surgeon. That he might shape his own destiny he fled from Württemberg in 1782. The following years, in which Schiller gradually gained the recognition he deserved, were a bitter battle against poverty; and when in 1789 he had been made professor of history in Jena, only two years passed before illness forced him to resign. At that moment generous friends came to his aid, and from now on Schiller could live for his ideals. As he had mastered the field of history, he now for years put his entire energy into the study of philosophy to round out his _Weltanschauung_ (his view of life) and his personality. Even as he worked, he knew that his years were numbered, but his indomitable will forced the weak body to do its bidding, and the best of Schiller's dramas, the greatest of his philosophical poems, were written in these years of illness. Thus Schiller proved himself the master of his fate, the captain of his soul. Only a few weeks before his death he wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, _"Am Ende sind wir doch beide Idealisten, und würden uns schämen, uns nachsagen zu lassen, daß die Dinge uns formten und wir nicht die Dinge."_ ("After all both of us are idealists and would be ashamed to have it reported of us that the things fashioned us and not we the things.") There was in Schiller, as Goethe said, _ein Zug nach dem Höheren_, a trend toward higher things. Schiller died in Weimar, May 9, 1805. As a poet Schiller is in many respects the exact counterpart of Goethe. The latter's lyric verse is the direct result of his everyday experience; his real domain is the simple lyric, _das Lied_. Schiller, however, confessed that lyric poetry in the narrower sense was not his province, but his exile. Hardly ever did an everyday experience move him to song, and he is at his best in the realm of philosophic poetry, where he has no equal. This philosophic tendency predominates even in his ballads, which are often the embodiment of a philosophical or ethical idea. While they lack the subtle lyrical atmosphere of Goethe's, they are distinguished by rhetorical vigor and dramatic life. Their very structure is dramatic, as an analysis of 18 and 19 will show. 18. Ibykus, a Greek lyric poet of the sixth century B.C., bom in Rhegium, a city in Southern Italy. 1. The Isthmian Games were celebrated every two years on the Isthmus of Corinth in honor of Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea.