August Wilhelm now put his translation of Shakespeare aside for a time, and turned his attention to the poets of the South. He experimented in all directions, translated fragments of Homer, of the Greek elegiac, lyric, dramatic, and idyllic poets, of almost all the Latin poets and many of the Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. At a later period he even translated Indian poetry, his aim being to make the German language a Pantheon for the divine in every tongue. He lingered longest over Dante, although he did not possess the mastery of form required to render the _terza rima_; he rhymed only two lines of each triplet, thus altering the character of the verse and doing away with the intertwining of the stanzas. After this he turned to _Romeo and Juliet_ and _Hamlet_, sending fragments of his translations to Friedrich, who showed them to Caroline. Her judgment was favourable on the whole, but she found fault with the style as being rather antiquated; this she ascribed to Wilhelm's having been lately employed in translating Dante, his ear having thereby become accustomed to obsolete words and expressions. The fact was, that shortly before this he had awakened to the necessity of being on his guard against the elaborate polish which he had made his aim after giving up Bürger's style; he now fell into the other extreme, became archaic, rugged, and hard. In 1797 Schlegel sent the first samples of _Romeo and Juliet_ to Schiller. They were printed in _Die Horen_; and in the same periodical there presently also appeared his essay, _Etwas über William Shakespeare bei Gelegenheit Wilhelm Meisters_. In _Wilhelm Meister_ Goethe had proclaimed the endeavour to understand Shakespeare to be an important element in German culture. In its conversations on _Hamlet_ he had refuted the foolish theory that the great dramatist was an uncultivated natural genius, destitute of artistic consciousness. Had such been the case, the exact reproduction of his style would not have been a matter of vital importance in a German translation. But with so great an artist as the Shakespeare presented to us in _Wilhelm Meister_, it was plain that the harmony between subject and form must not be deranged. And yet even Goethe himself had, without any feeling of unsuitability, given his quotations from _Hamlet_ in the old prose translation; even he had not realised how inseparably matter and manner are connected. Slowly and laboriously Schlegel progresses. His judgment is still so defective that he fancies it impossible to dispense with Alexandrines; in _Romeo and Juliet_, he retains the five-footed iambics only "as far as possible"; the scene between Romeo and Friar Laurence he renders in Alexandrines, excusing himself with the remark that this metre is less detrimental in speeches garnished with maxims and descriptions than in the dialogue proper of the drama. The result is the loss of Romeo's lyric fervour.