consisted of some four-score poems, signed with all manner of
intentionally misleading symbols and purporting to emanate from
Tobolsko, in Siberia. The most of the verses were the work of
Schiller.[34]

Among the poems of the 'Anthology' there are none that have become very
popular, none that are capable of affording any very keen delight to
the lover of poetry. One sees that their author's lyric gift was not of
the highest order. What is heard is not so much the note of honest
feeling as the effort of an active intellect, searching heaven and
earth for clever and striking things to say. Instead of learning from
the folk-song, Schiller had learned originally from Klopstock; and what
he had learned was to pose and philosophize and invest fictitious
sentiment with a maze of bewildering and far-fetched imagery. Then he
had lost sympathy with Klopstock's religiosity, had acquired a better
opinion of the things of sense, and had had his introduction to doubt
and disgust and rebellion. When now these moods sought expression in
verse, the verse took the form of impassioned rhetoric. He sang not as
the bird sings, but as a fervid youth sings who is eager to assert as
strongly as possible his emancipation from conventional modes of
thought and feeling.

The poems of the 'Anthology' are too numerous and in the main too
unimportant for an exhaustive review; it must suffice to glance at a few
of the more noteworthy. Several had been written at the academy and were
now published with more or less of retouching. To this number, it would
seem, belongs the one entitled 'The Glory of Creation', which is a
perfectly serious and devout poem on the grandeur and beauty of the
world. Along with this, however, we find another, entitled 'To God',
which tells of moods like those which had led Werther to characterize