But the most famous and on the whole the most interesting of the effusions in the 'Anthology' are the erotic verses addressed to Laura. Whether Schiller was humanly in love with his landlady, Frau Luise Vischer, is a rather futile question which German erudition has argued pro and con these many years without coming to an inexpugnable conclusion. Probably he was not, though he may have thought that he was. If he had been we should have heard of it sooner or later in authentic prose. But she interested him as the first of her sex who had come under his close observation. There were on his part the small gallantries of daily life, and on hers the responsiveness of a not very prudish widow quite willing to be adored. She played the piano. It was enough: the needy Petrarch had found a sufficient Laura--and never was a poet's goddess worshiped in such singular strains. We miss in them altogether that captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,--so lubricious in its suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he had become a libertine,--and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more than intellectual puzzles: they so occupy the mind in the mere effort of comprehension that little room is left for any emotion whatever. They leave one altogether cold. A 'Fantasie to Laura' identifies the rapturous passion with the force of gravitation which holds planets and systems in order. 'Blot it out from the mechanism of nature and the All bursts asunder in fragments; your worlds thunder into chaos; weep, Newtons, for their giant fall!' And then Laura's kiss! Aus den Schranken schwellen alle Sehnen, Seine Ufer überwallt das Blut; Körper will in Körper überstürzen, Lodern Seelen in vereinter Glut.[38]