After some hesitation between prose and verse he began in prose, being led thereto partly by the advice of Wilhelm von Humboldt and partly by his own desire to produce this time an acceptable stage-play. His progress was at first very slow. There was endless reading to be done and endless rumination over the plot. In the winter season, with its close confinement and its lowered vitality, the invalid could accomplish but little. He fixed his hopes longingly upon the return of spring and decided to buy a house with a garden, so that he could muse and write in the open air. In May, 1797, the purchase was made, but by this time work on 'Wallenstein' had completely stagnated and other interests were at the fore. He was back among the Greeks. Renewed study of Sophocles, particularly of the 'Trachiniae' and the 'Philoctetes', had convinced him that everything hinges upon the invention of a poetic fable. To quote again from a letter to Goethe: The modern poet wrestles laboriously and anxiously with accidental and subordinate matters and, in his effort to be very realistic, loads himself down with the vacuous and the trivial. Thus he runs a risk of losing the deep-lying truth which constitutes the real nature of the poetical. He would fain imitate an actual occurrence, and does not consider that a poetic representation can never coincide with actuality, because it is absolutely true. A little later he took up the study of Aristotle's 'Poetics' and was delighted to find that the dread Rhadamanthus was after all so very liberal and sensible. He had now reached a firm footing and was not to be dislodged even by Aristotle, whose whole body of doctrine, as he did not fail to observe, was deduced empirically from concrete specimens of a particular type of play. It could not be canonical for all the world, but it was very instructive. Schiller was glad that he had finally discovered Aristotle, but glad also that he had never read him before. On returning to 'Wallenstein' in October, after the summer claims of the 'Almanac' had been satisfied, he noticed that what he had written was characterized by a certain dryness. It was evident that, in his strenuous effort to avoid his besetting sin of rhetoric, he was in danger of becoming trivial. He had still a sustaining faith in the goodness of his subject, but the great problem would be to make it poetical. It was necessary to find the middle way between the rhetorical and the prosaic. The practical result of these cogitations was a decision to write 'Wallenstein' in verse. In versifying the completed scenes he found himself, so he wrote to Goethe, before a different tribunal. Much that had seemed very good in prose would not do at all; for verse tended to invest everything with an imaginative nimbus which rendered triviality and mere logic intolerable.