Goethe's as well as Schiller's youthful works had been inspired by what the Germans call the "Freigeisterei" of passion, its demand for freedom, its instinct of revolt. Both breathe one and the same spirit, the spirit of defiance. Goethe's _Die Geschwister_ treats of the passion of brother for sister. The conclusion of _Stella_, in its original form, is a justification of bigamy; and Jean Paul, too, in his _Siebenkäs_, treats of bigamy as a thing perfectly permissible in the case of a genius to whom the first tie has become burdensome. _Götz_ represents the tragic fate of the man of genius who rises in revolt against a lukewarm and corrupt age. Schiller's _Die Räuber_, with its device _In Tyrannos_, and its motto from Hippocrates, "That which medicine cannot cure iron cures, and that which iron cannot cure fire cures," is a declaration of war against society. Karl Moor is the noble-hearted idealist, who in "the castrated century" is inevitably doomed to perish as a criminal. Schiller's robbers are not highwaymen, but revolutionaries. They do not plunder, but punish. They have separated themselves from society to revenge themselves upon it for the wrongs it has done them. Schiller's defiance is still more personally expressed in those poems of his first period which were written under the influence of his relations with Frau von Kalb, poems re-written and entirely altered in the later editions. In the one which ultimately received the title _Der Kampf_, but which was originally called _Freigeisterei der Leidenschaft_, he writes:-- "Woher dies Zittern, dies unnennbare Entsetzen, Wenn mich dein liebevoller Arm umschlang? Weil Dich ein Eid, den auch nur Wallungen verletzen, In fremde Fesseln zwang? "Weil ein Gebrauch, den die Gesetze heilig prägen, Des Zufalls schwere Missethat geweiht? Nein--unerschrocken trotz ich einem Bund entgegen, Den die erröthende Natur bereut. "O zittre nicht--Du hast als Sünderin geschworen, Ein Meineid ist der Reue fromme Pflicht, Das Herz war mein, das Du vor dem Altar verloren, Mit Menschenfreuden spielt der Himmel nicht."[1] Comical as this naïve sophistry sounds, and unreliable as is the assurance that Heaven will not permit itself now and again to play with human happiness, the spirit of the verses is unmistakable; and, as Hettner aptly observes, Don Carlos uses almost the same words: "The rights of my love are older than the ceremonies at the altar."