Between then and now many and many a writer has compared Goethe with Schiller and undertaken to reckon up the balance of their respective merit. The task is not easy, even though the world is now well agreed that Goethe's was the rarer genius. No doubt he, much more than Schiller, was destined to be a bringer of light to the coming century; but the immense prestige of his name is due partly to the happy fate that gave him a long life and invested his old age with the glamour of literary kingship. If we compare the actual production of the two men during the eleven years of their association, it is not at all clear that the palm should be given to Goethe. The five plays of Schiller, with the 'Song of the Bell', and the best of his shorter poems, will bear comparison very well, in the aggregate, with 'Wilhelm Meister', 'Hermann and Dorothea', the 'Natural Daughter' and those portions of 'Faust' which were written at this time. Unquestionably Goethe at his best was a far greater poet than Schiller; but he was less steadily at his best, and his artistic conscience was more lax than Schiller's. He envisaged life more largely and more truly, and he wrote with his eye upon the object. His nature inclined to placid contemplation; he was no orator, though something of a preacher. He did not care so much to stir the depths of feeling as to inform and liberalize. In his imaginative work he let himself go _mit holdem Irren_ and preferred to avoid artificial surprises and stagy contrasts. Wherefore his work is the more illuminative, the more suggestive,--he is the poet of the literary class. Schiller, on the other hand, was an orator who never lost sight of the effect he wished to produce. He worked more intensely, more methodically, and was less dependent upon mood. He is thus the poet of those who care less for delicacy of workmanship than for sonorous diction, elevated sentiment and telling effects. There is room in the world for both kinds of endowment. It is quite probable that Goethe and Schiller would sooner or later have come together in a friendly relation even if the _Horen_ had never been thought of; and in that case their friendship would have lacked the militant tinge that it presently took on. It was the magazine that leagued them together as allies against the forces of Philistia and made Thuringia the storm-center of a new literary movement. But for this it would probably never have occurred to any one to dub them 'the Dioscuri'.