Thus St. Réal's pathetic tale of love and intrigue had been left far behind, and out of it had come a tragedy of amiable political idealism, growing insolent with self-confidence and losing touch with present realities in its dazzling dream of things to come. 'The soul of Shakspere's Hamlet, the blood and nerves of Leisewitz's Julius, the pulse of Schiller himself',--this, it will be recalled, was the original formula for the composition of Prince Carlos. But, alas, the soul of one of Shakspere's heroes is not so easily purloined, and Schiller did not succeed well in his proposed larceny. What we find is not the soul but the situation of Hamlet: a young prince just returned from the university,--troubled by a strange melancholy,--a mystery to king and court,--beset by spies whom he sends packing,--visited by a dear academic friend,--called to a great work to which he feels himself unequal, and so forth. The parallel is obvious, but it hardly goes beyond externalities. Nor does the portrait of Carlos owe very much that is vital to Leisewitz. He gives us, to be sure, a love-sick prince whose illicit passion unnerves him, and like Carlos Julius has a friend who admonishes him to be a man. But there the resemblance ends; he has not the strength to renounce and remains to the end a sentimental weakling. The truth is that the soul, pulse, blood and nerves of Carlos are simply Schiller's own. There is no other creation of his into which he put so much of himself. That feeling of dark despair and dead ambition to which Carlos gives expression in his first dialogue with Posa is but a poetic echo of actual experiences. I too have known a Carlos in my dreams Whose cheek flushed crimson when he heard the name Of Freedom. But that Carl is dead and buried,-- sighs the Spanish prince. 'I might perhaps have become great, but fate took the field against me too early.... Love and esteem me for that which I might have become under more favorable stars',--writes the actual Schiller.[69] And just as Carlos throws himself into the arms of Posa and thinks to find his all in friendship, so Schiller hoped ineffable things from Körner. Nowhere else in literature has the eighteenth-century cult of friendship found such fervid, and in the main such noble, expression as in 'Don Carlos'.