What was the bond of our friendship? Was it selfishness? Was it frivolity? Was it folly? Was it an earthly, vulgar, or a higher, immortal, celestial bond? Speak! Speak! Oh, a friendship erected like ours might have endured through eternity.... If you or I had died ten times, death should not have filched from us a single hour! What a friendship that might have been! And now! Now! What has become of it?... Hear, Scharffenstein! God is there! God hears me and thee, and may God judge! And so on for six mortal pages, octavo print. The modern cynic will smile at this ecstatic cultus of friendship, but let him at the same time recall the saying of Goethe that what makes the poet is a heart completely filled with one emotion.[11] It is now time to glance at the really important phase of Schiller's youthful development--his reading. While his native Suabia, just then rather backward in literary matters, was still chewing the cud of pious conventionality, a prodigious ferment had begun in the outside world. What is called the 'Storm and Stress' was under way. The spirit of revolt, which in France was preparing a political upheaval, was abroad in Germany, where it found expression in stormy or sentimental plays and novels,--works composed on the principle that everything is permissible except the tame and the conventional. The productions of these young innovators differed widely from one another, but they had a common note in their vehement would-be naturalism. There were over-wrought pictures of daring sin and terrible punishment; novels and plays laying bare the _misère_ of the social conflict; tragedies of insurgent passion at war with conventional ideas; of true love crossed and done to death by the prejudice of caste. And so forth. How much of this literature fell into the hands of Schiller at the academy can not be told with perfect certainty, but it would seem that very little of it escaped him. He read and was deeply touched by Gerstenberg's 'Ugolino', with its horrific picture of the agonies of starvation. He read the early writings of Goethe, of Leisewitz and of Klinger, and was touched by the woes of Miller's Siegwart. In 'Emilia Galotti', with its drastic comment upon the infamies of princely lust, he saw the subject of court life in a light very different from that in which it habitually appeared to the carefully guarded pupils of the Stuttgart academy. He became acquainted with Ossian, and the shadowy forms of the Celtic bard, big with their indefinable woe, increased the turmoil of his soul. Probably he read Rousseau more or less, though direct evidence of the fact is lacking. At any rate the air was surcharged with Rousseauite feeling. Certainly he read Plutarch and Cervantes, and along with all these came Shakspere,[12] to whom he was introduced--in the Wieland translation--by his favorite teacher, Abel.