The great charm of the 'Song' lies in its vivid pictures of the epochs, pursuits and occurrences which constitute the joy and the woe of life for an ordinary industrious burgher. Childhood and youth; the passion of the lover, sobering into the steadfast love of the husband; the busy toil of the married pair in field and household; the delight of accumulation and possession; the calamity of fire that destroys the labor of years; the blessedness of peaceful industry; the horrors of revolutionary fanaticism; the benediction of civic concord,--these are the themes that are brought before us in a series of stirring pictures that are irresistibly fascinating. To have felt and expressed so admirably the poetry of every-day life, and that at the very time when the Romanticists were beginning to fill the air with noise about the prosaic dullness of the present time as compared with the Middle Ages, was a great achievement, and all the greater as Schiller himself had not remained unaffected by the Romantic doctrine. He could Hellenize and philosophize, and, on occasion, he could Romanticize; but 'The Song of the Bell' shows how deeply, after all, his feeling was rooted in the life of the German people. The 'Almanac' for 1800 was the last volume that appeared, and after the removal of this exigency Schiller's lyrical production diminished. His best strength was devoted to his plays, which in themselves, however, contain a large lyric element. The choral parts of 'The Bride of Messina' show the final phase of his art in its perfection. Like these, the few independent poems written by him during the last years of his life are characterized by great beauty of diction and of rhythmic cadence, but in their substance they hardly compare with the best of his previous work. Most noteworthy are 'Cassandra', devoted to the pathos of foreseeing calamity without being able to prevent it, and 'The Festival of Victory', wherein the Greek heroes, assembled for departure after the sack of Troy, discourse amiably and profoundly upon the finer issues of life. In some of the shorter and more subjective poems there is discernible a note of sadness, as of a drooping spirit unreconciled, after all, to the stress of this earthly existence. This is heard, for example, in 'Longing' and 'The Pilgrim'. But from such sporadic utterances no large inference should be drawn respecting Schiller's mental history. They proceeded from a sick man whose days were numbered. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 103: "The One remains, the many change and pass, Heaven's light forever shines, earth's shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity." --_Shelley's "Adonais"_.] [Footnote 104: Bulwer's Translation.] [Footnote 105: Bulwer's Translation.] [Footnote 106: "Social Forces in German Literature", p. 376.] [Footnote 107: "Dichtung und Wahrheit", sechzehntes Buch.] [Footnote 108: Buiwer translates the lines, somewhat lamely, thus: