The poet rapidly closed the window, and drew the folds of the old threadbare coat which served him as a dressing-gown closer around his shivering form. "The good and true Streicher," he murmured in a low voice, "is an honest soul, and means well, and does not know how he has injured me to-day! I was in the grandest flow of enthusiasm; all the discomforts and necessities of life had disappeared! I was no longer cold, there were no more tormenting creditors, no cares, and no pangs of love! I was in thy heaven, Father Zeus! And the messenger of my friend comes and calls me back to the cold, inhospitable earth. The fire of my enthusiasm is extinguished, and now I am sensible that there is no fire in the stove!" He raised his large blue eyes, and glanced through the dimly-lighted space toward the high black stove, within the open grate of which only a few glimmering coals were visible. "No fire," sighed Schiller, shrugging his shoulders, "and no wood to make one. Poor, feeble man! The fire of the soul does not suffice to warm thy shivering body, and the prose of life ever recalls thee from the Elysian fields of poetry. But it shall have no power over me. I will defy it! Forgive me, friend Streicher, but I cannot do your bidding! Your watchman calls to me to sleep, but Don Carlos calls to me to be wakeful! I cannot let the Spanish prince call in vain! Fortunately the coffee-pot is still standing in the stove. If it is yet warm, something can be done for the poor, shivering body." He rapidly went across the room to the stove, knelt down before the fire-place, drew the brown coffee-pot from its bed of ashes, raised it to his lips and refreshed himself with several long draughts, after which he carefully restored the vessel to its former place. Truly a strange sight, this long, thin figure in the gray-yellow flannel gown, a pointed nightcap on his head, stooping before the stove and occupying himself with a coffee-pot! If the admirers of the tragic poet Schiller could have seen him in this position, they would never have believed that the young man in this miserable apparel--the long, lean, angular figure, with the bony, homely face and yellow hair, loosed from the confinement of the queue, and falling in dishevelled masses over his sunken cheeks--that this man was the author of the three tragedies which for the last few years had filled all Germany with astonishment, admiration, and terror. Like the column of fire, harbinger of a new era, they towered on the grave of the old, licking the heavens with tongues of flame.