The last decisive event in Schiller’s life was his friendship with Goethe. It dates from 1794, and with this year begins the great and crowning period of Schiller’s life. To this period belong his “Wallenstein,” his “Song of the Bell,” his Ballads (1797-98), his “Mary Stuart” (1800), the “Maid of Orleans” (1801), the “Bride of Messina” (1803), and “William Tell;” in fact, all the works which have made Schiller a national poet and gained for him a worldwide reputation and an immortal name. Goethe’s character was in many respects diametrically opposed to Schiller’s, and for many years it seemed impossible that there should ever be a community of thought and feeling between the two. Attempts to bring together these great rivals were repeatedly made by their mutual friends. Schiller had long felt himself drawn by the powerful genius of Goethe, and Goethe had long felt that Schiller was the only poet who could claim to be his peer. After an early interview with Goethe, Schiller writes, “On the whole, this meeting has not at all diminished the idea, great as it was, which I had previously formed of Goethe; but I doubt if we shall ever come into close communication with each other. Much that interests me has already had its epoch with him; his world is not my world.” Goethe had expressed the same feeling. He saw Schiller occupying the very position which he himself had given up as untenable; he saw his powerful genius carrying out triumphantly “those very paradoxes, moral and dramatic, from which he was struggling to get liberated.” “No union,” as Goethe writes, “was to be dreamt of. Between two spiritual antipodes there was more intervening than a simple diameter of the spheres. Antipodes of that sort act as a kind of poles, which can never coalesce.” How the first approach between these two opposite poles took place Goethe has himself described, in a paper entitled “Happy Incidents.” But no happy incident could have led to that glorious friendship, which stands alone in the literary history of the whole world, if there had not been on the part of Schiller his warm sympathy for all that is great and noble, and on the part of Goethe a deep interest in every manifestation of natural genius. Their differences on almost every point of art, philosophy, and religion, which at first seemed to separate them forever, only drew them more closely together, when they discovered in each other those completing elements which produced true harmony of souls. Nor is it right to say that Schiller owes more to Goethe than Goethe to Schiller. If Schiller received from Goethe the higher rules of art and a deeper insight into human nature, Goethe drank from the soul of his friend the youth and vigor, the purity and simplicity, which we never find in any of Goethe’s works before his “Hermann and Dorothea.” And, as in most friendships, it was not so much Goethe as he was, but Goethe as reflected in his friend’s soul, who henceforth became Schiller’s guide and guardian.