And so it was destined to be. His philosophic studies, pursued with tireless zeal for a period of three or four years, gave him the self-assurance that he hoped for. They created for him at least, if not for all men everywhere, a poetical _modus vivendi_ between natural impulse and artistic rule. 'Nature' learned to wear the fetters of art without feeling them as fetters. At last he grew weary of theorizing; but his later plays, produced in rapid succession, each unlike the other and all characterized by a remarkable imaginative breadth and freedom, bear witness to the quantity of artistic energy stored up during this period of artistic self-repression. A few words of biography will suffice for the goings and comings of this Kantian period, which was for Schiller a period of quiet study, eager discussion and laborious authorship. At first he continued to reside in Jena. Early in 1792 he started the _New Thalia_, and this he used for the publication of his earlier aesthetic lucubrations. With the perfunctory conclusion of the 'Thirty Years' War', in September, his work as a historian virtually came to an end. He now began to lecture again, but gave only an aesthetic _privatissimum_ in his own room. He went out of the house hardly five times during the whole winter, and when spring came his health was again very precarious. He now determined to try the effect upon body and soul of the milder climate of his native Suabia. He set out in August and took the precaution to halt in Heilbronn, not knowing what brutality the Duke of Württemberg might still be capable of. On receiving the blessed assurance that his Highness would 'ignore' him, he continued on his way to Ludwigsburg, where a son was born, to him in September. He remained in Ludwigsburg during the winter in pleasant intercourse with his family and friends. In October Karl Eugen went to his reward. 'The death of the old Herod', Schiller wrote to Körner, 'does not concern me or my family, except that all who have to do directly, like my father, with the head of the state, are glad that they now have a man before them.'[87]