A thousand times I envied your son as he was wrestling with death, and would have given up my life as calmly as I go to bed. I am not yet twenty-one years old, but I can tell you frankly that the world has no further charm for me. I have no delight in thinking of the world, and the day of my departure from the academy, which a few years ago would have been a day of festal joy, will not be able to force one happy smile from me. With each step, as I grow older, I lose more and more of my contentedness; and the nearer I come to the age of maturity, the more I could wish that I had died in childhood. This sounds gloomy enough, but the desperate mood did not last long, A number of medical reports written in the summer of 1780 indicate that Schiller was able to take the calm professional view of a case very similar to his own. A fellow-student named Grammont was afflicted with hypochondria, and Schiller was set to watch him. His analysis of the case is eminently sane. He finds it difficult to decide whether the young man's malady has its seat in the mind or in the bowels: whether too much brooding over hard problems has ruined his digestion and given him a headache, or whether a physical derangement has confused his ideas of duty and religion. He thinks there is a fair chance of curing the patient by means of medicine and good advice.--A youth who can talk thus of another's _Weltschmerz_ is himself in no great danger from the malady. In November, 1780, he submitted a new thesis upon 'The Connection between Man's Animal and Spiritual Nature'. In this essay he considers the question whether, for the purposes of moral perfection, the body is to be regarded as the enemy and gaoler of the soul, or as its friend and coadjutor. The drift of his argument is to show in detail the dependence of the spirit upon the flesh. Finding that philosophers have been unjust to the body, he comes to its rescue,--expounding good doctrine in an interesting though rather florid and unprofessional style. In the course of his philosophizing he perpetrates the sly joke of quoting from his own manuscript play and ascribing the words to an imaginary 'Life of Moor', by one Krake.--Further comment upon the essay may be dispensed with,[16] seeing that Schiller as a medical man does not greatly interest us at the present time. Enough that it was accepted and procured him his release from bondage toward the close of the year.