Meanwhile he had taken up the study of the Greek poets and found them very edifying and sanative--just the influence that he needed to clarify his judgment and correct his earlier vagaries of taste. He was fascinated by the _Odyssey_ and in a mood of fleeting enthusiasm he resolved to read nothing but the ancients for the next two years. He translated the _Iphigenia in Aulis_ of Euripides and a part of _The Phenician Women_. Out of this newborn ardor grew two important poems, _The Gods of Greece_ and _The Artists_; the former an elegy on the decay of Greek polytheism conceived as a loss of beauty to the world, the latter a philosophic retrospect of human history wherein the evolutionary function of art is glorified. At the same time he revived the dormant _Thalia_ and used its columns for the continued publication of _The Ghost-seer_, a pot-boiling novel which he had begun at Dresden. It is Schiller's one serious attempt at prose fiction. His initial purpose was to describe an elaborate and fine-spun intrigue, devised by mysterious agents of the Church of Rome, for the winning over of a Protestant German prince. The story begins in a promising way, and the later portions contain fine passages of narrative and character-drawing. But its author presently began to feel that it was unworthy of him and left it unfinished. [Illustration: MONUMENT TO SCHILLER (Berlin) _Sculptor, Reinhold Begas_] On the 22d of February, 1790, Schiller was married to Lotte von Lengefeld, with whom he lived most happily the rest of his days. His letters of this period tell of a quiet joy such as he had not known before. And then, suddenly, his fair prospects were clouded by the disastrous breakdown of his health. An attack of pneumonia in the winter of 1790-1791 came near to a fatal ending, and hardly had he recovered from that before he was prostrated by a second illness worse than the first. He bade farewell to his friends, and the report went abroad that he was dead. After a while he rallied, but never again to be strong and well. From this time forth he must be thought of as a semi-invalid, doomed to a very cautious mode of living and expectant of an early death. It was to be a fourteen years' battle between a heroic soul and an ailing body.