Now came a short season of helpless and comical dismay. 'I would take a thrashing', he wrote to Körner, 'if I could have you here for four-and-twenty hours. Goethe quotes his _docendo discitur_, but these gentlemen do not seem to know how small my learning is.' To Lotte he declared that he should feel ridiculous in the new situation. 'Many a student will perhaps know more history than the professor. Nevertheless I think like Sancho Panza with respect to his governorship: To whom God gives an office, to him he gives understanding; and when I have my island I shall rule it like a nabob.' It was not pleasant to drop his fascinating studies of the Greek poets and bury himself in learned sawdust, but the thing was not to be helped. So the winter and spring were devoted mainly to historical reading. At the same time, however, 'The Ghostseer' was carried along in the now resuscitated _Thalia_, and the long poem, 'The Artists', was slowly and with infinite revision got ready for publication in the _Merkur_. During this period he saw little or nothing of Goethe and steadily nursed a splenetic determination not to like the man. Passages in his letters are almost comical in their perversity of misjudgment. He was exasperated by Goethe's reticence, composure and self-sufficiency,--qualities which seemed to him to spring out of calculating egotism. Goethe, so the arraignment ran, was a man who went on his way serenely dispensing favors, winning love and admiration and putting people under obligation, but always like a god,--without ever giving his intimate self or surrendering his own freedom. For his part, he, Schiller, did not wish to live near such a man, much as he admired his intellect and valued his judgment. This attitude of his was a great trial to the Lengefeld sisters, who did not fail to expostulate with him. But it was of no use. 'I have not time', he declared, 'in this short and busy life, to attempt a decipherment of Goethe's enigmatic character. If he is really such a very lovable being, I shall find it out in the next world, when we shall all be angels.' In fine he was not yet ripe for an understanding of the Weimar sovereign. He did not see that Goethe's method was after all a giving of himself, and that the self thus given was not the worse but the better for having outgrown the effusive raptures of sentimentalism.