Nor took a guerdon from the fleeting day;
But dwelt on earth in that eternity
Where Truth and Beauty shine with blended ray.[2]

Friedrich Schiller, the greatest of German dramatic poets, was born
November 10, 1759, at Marbach in Swabia. His father was an officer in
the army which the Duke of Württemberg sent out to fight the Prussians
in the Seven Years' War. Of his mother, whose maiden name was Dorothea
Kodweis, not much is known. She was a devout woman who lived in the
cares and duties of a household that sometimes felt the pinch of
poverty. After the war the family lived a while at the village of
Lorch, where Captain Schiller was employed as recruiting officer. From
there they moved, in 1766, to Ludwigsburg, where the extravagant duke
Karl Eugen had taken up his residence and was bent on creating a sort
of Swabian Versailles. Here little Fritz went to school and was
sometimes taken to the gorgeous ducal opera, where he got his first
notions of scenic illusion. The hope of his boyhood was to become a
preacher, but this pious aspiration was brought to naught by the offer
of free tuition in an academy which the duke had started at his Castle
Solitude near Stuttgart.

This academy was Schiller's world from his fourteenth to his
twenty-first year. It was an educational experiment conceived in a
rather liberal spirit as a training-school for public service. At
first the duke had the boys taught under his own eye at Castle
Solitude, where they were subjected to a strict military discipline.
There being no provision for the study of divinity, Schiller was put
into law, with the result that he floundered badly for two years. In
1775 the institution was augmented by a faculty of medicine and
transferred to Stuttgart, where it was destined to a short-lived