It makes one lose patience to think how Schiller shut himself up in a stuffy closet of a room all day with his exhausting work; and how the sole recreation he allowed himself during the week was a solemn game of _l'hombre_ with the philosopher Schelling. And then he wondered why he could not get on with his writing and why he was forever catching cold (_einen starken Schnupfen_); and why his head was so thick half the time that he couldn't do a thing with it. In his correspondence with Goethe it is exasperating to observe that these great poets kept so little reserve vim in stock that a slight change of temperature or humidity, or even a dark day, was enough to overdraw their health account and bankrupt their work. How glorious it would have been if they had only stored up enough exuberance to have made them health magnates, impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous February, and able to snap their fingers and flourish inspired quills in the face of a vile March! In that case their published works might not, perhaps, have gained much in bulk, but the masterpieces would now surely represent a far larger proportion of their _Saemmtliche Werke_ than they do. And the second part of "Faust" would not, I think, contain that lament about the flesh so seldom having wings to match those of the spirit. "Ach! zu des Geistes Fluegeln wird so leicht Kein korperlicher Fluegel sich gesellen." Some of the most opulent and powerful spirits ever seen on earth have scarcely done more than indicate what kind of birthrights they bartered away for a mess of pottage. Coleridge, for example, ceased to write poetry after thirty because, by dissipating his overplus of life, he had too grievously wronged what he described as "This body that does me grievous wrong."