Schiller's great reputation rests, and will ever rest, unshaken, on his dramas. Regarding his first three, which we have named, as preparatory studies to his dramatic career, he has left six finished tragedies, viz.--_Don Carlos_, _The Maid of Orleans_, _Wallenstein_ (in three parts,) _Mary Stuart_, _The Bride of Messina_, and _William Tell_--works, in whose conception and execution the highest principles of art control with plastic power the glowing materials of a rich, deep, fervent mind, ordering and disposing them with such commanding skill, as to produce dramas, which are not merely effective in theatrical representation, and soul-stirring to the reader as pictures of passion, but which, by the rare combination of refined art with mental fertility and poetic genius, exhibit, each one of them, that highest result of the exertion of the human faculties--a great poem. Possessing, in common with other gifted writers, the various endowments needed in a dramatist and poet of the highest order, the individual characteristic of Schiller is elevation. The predominant tendency of his mind is ever upwards. Open his volumes any where, and in a few moments the reader feels himself lifted up into an ideal region. The leading characters in his plays, though true to humanity, have an ideal loftiness. You figure them to yourself as of heroic stature, such grandeur and nobleness is there in their strain of sentiment {379} and expression. The same characteristic pervades his prose and lyrical poetry. Had he never written a drama, his two volumes of lyrical poetry would suffice to enthrone him among the first class of poets, so beautiful is it and at the same time of such depth of meaning, so musical and so thought-pregnant. No where is the dignity of human nature more nobly asserted than in the works of Schiller; as pure, and simple, and noble, as a man, as he is powerful and beautiful as a poet. In the full vigor of his faculties, his mind matured by experience and severe culture, and teeming with poetic plans, he died in 1805, having reached only his forty-sixth year. Of Schiller's great rival and friend, Goethe, as of Schiller himself, I can, in the limited space allowed in such a lecture as this, only give you a rapid sketch.