Such a scheme, in the hands of a Schiller, leads inevitably to a crescendo of rhetorical contrasts, which in the end sound somewhat flighty and forced. The poem was an object of ridicule to the Romanticists, and the elder Schlegel wrote a saucy parody of the first two strophes.[109] The few poems that found a place in the 'Almanac' of 1797, along with the luxuriant crop of Xenia, are relatively unimportant. The difference between the sexes, a subject which Wilhelm von Humboldt had discussed in the _Horen_, was expounded anew by Schiller in distichs. It is very much the same story as the 'Dignity of Women', the distich form lending itself beautifully to those antitheses which were Schiller's delight. Then there was a poetic riddle, called 'The Maiden from Afar',--a slight affair, but pretty in its way; a 'Lament of Ceres', in trochaic tetrameters, and a 'Dithyramb', wherein a poet is visited by all the Olympian gods and cheered with a draught of Hebe's joy-giving nectar. These classicizing poems, which purport to express modern feeling in the terms of Greek mythology, sound now a little hollow and conventional. The vein had been worked to excess even in Schiller's day, and it is no wonder that the Romanticists pined for something new. The best of them all is 'The Eleusinian Festival', called originally 'Song of the Citizen', in which Schiller returns to his favorite theme--the origin and progress of civilized society. The climactic thought of the twenty-seven sonorous stanzas is contained in the Kantian oracle of Ceres: Freiheit liebt das Tier der Wüste, Frei im Äther herrscht der Gott, Ihrer Brust gewalt'ge Lüste Zähmet das Naturgebot; Doch der Mensch, in ihrer Mitte, Soll sich an den Menschen reihn, Und allein durch seine Sitte Kann er frei und mächtig sein.[110] In the spring of the year 1797, as 'Hermann and Dorothea' was approaching completion, Goethe and Schiller were led to an interchange of views concerning the distinctive qualities of epic poetry. Their discussion begot an interest in the kindred type of the ballad, which may be regarded as a miniature epic in a lyrical form. The result was that both poets began to make ballads for the next year's 'Almanac'. Schiller contributed five: 'The Diver', 'The Ring of Polycrates', 'The Cranes of Ibycus', 'The Errand at the Furnace' and 'The Knight of Toggenburg'. In subsequent years he wrote three others: 'The Pledge', 'Hero and Leander' and 'The Count of Hapsburg'. To these may be added 'The Glove ', which was not called a ballad because not written in uniform stanzas, and 'The Fight with the Dragon ', which was called a 'romanza'.