Schiller meets with many a welcome, and rarely a heartier one than when he brings his Wilhelm Tell or Jungfrau. I should be glad to ask some of those who are more intimate with him than I am, whether he is not a good deal like three wise men, whose plays Socrates and I used to go to see performed at Athens, two or three thousand years ago, when I was there. Further, I should be glad to ask whether it would not be better if, in one respect, he were more like them still. As he at least has seemed to me to do, they threw the strength of their invention into two or three impersonations; but as he sometimes does, they always--to steal a term from the nearest grocery--lumped all the merely necessary and accessary people, and called them simply 'Chorus.' Thus the wise men's ingenuities and our memories were spared the trouble of assigning and remembering a host of insignificant names; and there was no looking back to the _dramatis personae_, or _dramatos prosopa_, as we called them then, to find out _who was who_. A Government officer sometimes reports himself at my gates from Rydal, with a washing tub of ink on castors, which he pushes about with him wherever he goes, and in which, as in a Claude-Lorraine mirror, he contemplates everything that he can both on earth and above. He is constantly employed in fishing in it with a quill for ideas; and as often as he catches one, even if it is half drowned, my door-keeper opens to him. Lady Geraldine was one of my most constant guests of an evening. But after her courtship and marriage, she was too apt to bring in her husband. I received him cordially enough two or three times, particularly when he came with 'the good news from Ghent.' But on other occasions his conversation was so far from agreeable, so unintelligible, or, 'not to put too fine a point upon it,' unedifying, that at last my porter was obliged to hand him out for immediate chastisement.[5] He never came again. I do not quite see why not; for, if others are willing to take pains for his good, he certainly should be no less so. Mrs. Stowe does honor to one of the most honorable places in the assembly--her head crowned with an everlasting glory by the spirit of Uncle Tom. Poor Charlotte Bronte is always present. She looks happy at last, with a happiness that is not of this world; and if her laurels are but earthly laurels, I often fancy that in the hand which smoothed her sisters' deathbeds, I can discern a heavenly palm. There are not many secular writers whom I would not turn away, if need were, to make room for her. If I do not always admire her characters, I do her mind. I do not altogether like her stories; but I want words to express my appreciation of the way in which she tells them.