Schiller, too modest to suppose he had earned such favors, was filled with a new zeal, and his poetical genius displayed for a time an almost inexhaustible energy. Scarcely had his “Wallenstein” been finished, in 1799, when he began his “Mary Stuart.” This play was finished in the summer of 1800, and a new one was taken in hand in the same year,—the “Maid of Orleans.” In the spring of 1801 the “Maid of Orleans” appeared on the stage, to be followed in 1803 by the “Bride of Messina,” and in 1804 by his last great work, his “William Tell.” During the same time Schiller composed his best ballads, his “Song of the Bell,” his epigrams, and his beautiful Elegy, not to mention his translations and adaptations of English and French plays for the theatre at Weimar. After his “William Tell” Schiller could feel that he no longer owed his place by the side of Goethe to favor and friendship, but to his own work and worth. His race was run, his laurels gained. His health, however, was broken, and his bodily frame too weak to support the strain of his mighty spirit. Death came to his relief, giving rest to his mind, and immortality to his name. Let us look back once more on the life of Schiller. The lives of great men are the lives of martyrs; we cannot regard them as examples to follow, but rather as types of human excellence to study and to admire. The life of Schiller was not one which many of us would envy; it was a life of toil and suffering, of aspiration rather than of fulfillment, a long battle with scarcely a moment of rest for the conqueror to enjoy his hard-won triumphs. To an ambitious man the last ten years of the poet’s life might seem an ample reward for the thirty years’ war of life which he had to fight single-handed. But Schiller was too great a man to be ambitious. Fame with him was a means, never an object. There was a higher, a nobler aim in his life, which upheld him in all his struggles. From the very beginning of his career Schiller seems to have felt that his life was not his. He never lived for himself; he lived and worked for mankind. He discovered within himself how much there was of the good, the noble, and the beautiful in human nature; he had never been deceived in his friends. And such was his sympathy with the world at large that he could not bear to see in any rank of life the image of man, created in the likeness of God, distorted by cunning, pride, and selfishness. His whole poetry may be said to be written on the simple text, “Be true, be good, be noble!” It may seem a short text, but truth is very short, and the work of the greatest teachers of mankind has always consisted in the unflinching inculcation of these short truths. There is in Schiller’s works a kernel full of immortal growth, which will endure long after the brilliant colors of his poetry have faded away. That kernel is the man, and without it Schiller’s poetry, like all other poetry, is but the song of sirens.