The Life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an Examination of His WorksCarlyle, Thomas
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The Life of Friedrich Schiller: Comprehending an Examination of His Works
Carlyle, Thomas
Authors, German -- 18th century -- Biography; Schiller, Friedrich, 1759-1805; Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel, 1739-1791
'In this season of time, so dangerous for the moral purity of the
young man, his Mother again was his good Genius; a warning and
request, in her soft tone of love sufficed to recall youthful levity
within the barriers again, and restore the balance. She anxiously
contrived, too, that the Son, often and willingly, visited his
Father's house. Whenever Schiller had decided to give himself a good
day, he wandered out with some friend as far as Solitüde.' (Only some
four or five miles.) '"What a baking and a roasting then went on by
that good soul," says one who witnessed it, "for the dear Prodigy of a
Son and the comrade who had come with him; for whom the good Mother
never could do enough! Never have I seen a better maternal heart, a
more excellent, more domestic, more womanly woman."
'The admiring recognition which the Son had already found among his
youthful friends, and in wider circles, was no less grateful to her
heart than the gradual perception that his powerful soul, welling
forth from the interior to the outward man, diffused itself into his
very features, and by degrees even advantageously altered the
curvatures and the form of his body. His face about this time got rid
of its freckles and irregularities of skin; and strikingly improved,
moreover, by the circumstance that the hitherto rather drooping nose
gradually acquired its later aquiline form. And withal, the youthful
Poet, with the growing consciousness of his strength and of his worth,
assumed an imposing outward attitude; so that a witty Stuttgart Lady,
whose house Schiller often walked past, said of him: "Regiment's Dr.
Schiller steps out as if the Duke were one of his inferior servants!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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