Excerpt from Schiller's Poems: Edited With Introduction and Notes All that a poet can give us is his individuality. This must therefore be worthy of exhibition to the world and to posterity. To dignify this personality as much as possible, to refine it until it attains the purest and noblest humanity, this must be his first and para mount concern, before he may venture to appeal to the sympathy of worthy men. Schiller himself bears triumphantly this severe test, which he applied with excessive rigor to an older contemporary in his review of Bilrger's lyric poetry. The main purpose of the present volume is to present Schiller's personality as expressed in his poems; a personality that compelled the homage and won the affection of such men as Humboldt and Goethe, and that through a century full of vicissitudes and rich in literary development has made Schiller always in the widest sense the best beloved of German authors. There have been periods of violent reaction from Schiller's literary theory and manner; but the attacks made upon him have always been either conscious or involuntary tributes to the power of his individuality and of his influence; and none of them have ever availed to shake his popularity or to drag him down from his eminence as the sharer with Goethe of the highest glory in German literature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.