While at Ludwigsburg he read from the prescribed Latin authors,
making the acquaintance of Ovid, Vergil and Horace, and in time won
praise for his facility in writing Latin verses. Some of his school
exercises have chanced to be preserved. The earliest, dated Jan. 1,
1769, is a Latin translation in prose of some verses which seem to have
been supplied by his teacher for the purpose. The handwriting and the
Latin tell of faithful juvenile toil and moderate success--nothing more.
Nor can we extract much biographic interest from the later distichs and
_carmina_ which he turned out at school festivals. Such things have
flowed easily from the pen of many a bright schoolboy whom the bees of
Hymettus failed to visit.

According, to Schiller's own testimony[7] his earliest attempt at German
verse was made on the occasion of his confirmation, in April, 1772. On
the day before the solemn ceremony he was playing about with his
comrades in what seemed to his mother an all too worldly frame of mind.
She rebuked him for his unseasonable levity, whereat the youngster went
into himself, as the Germans say, and poured out his supposed feelings
in a string of verses so tender and soulful as to draw from his amazed
father the exclamation: 'Fritz, are you going crazy?'

After such a beginning we are not surprised to learn that German poetry
made its first strong appeal to him through the pious muse of Klopstock.
His earliest more ambitious note is heard in a 'Hymn to the Sun',
written in his fourteenth year. It is the note of supernal religious
pathos. In rimeless lines of unequal length he celebrates the glory of
God in the firmament, soars into celestial space and winds up with a
vision of the last great cataclysm. All this is sufficiently
Klopstockian, as is also the boyish dream of an epic about Moses, and of
a tragedy to be called 'The Christians'.