Pale, at its ghastly noon,
Pauses above the death-still wood the moon;
The night-sprite sighing, through the dim air stirs;
The clouds descend in rain;
Mourning, the wan stars wane,
Flickering like dying lamps in sepulchres!

Haggard as spectres, vision-like and dumb,
Dark with the pomp of Death, and moving slow,
Towards that sad lair the pale Procession come
Where the Grave closes on the Night below.[37]

But the most famous and on the whole the most interesting of the
effusions in the 'Anthology' are the erotic verses addressed to Laura.
Whether Schiller was humanly in love with his landlady, Frau Luise
Vischer, is a rather futile question which German erudition has argued
pro and con these many years without coming to an inexpugnable
conclusion. Probably he was not, though he may have thought that he was.
If he had been we should have heard of it sooner or later in authentic
prose. But she interested him as the first of her sex who had come under
his close observation. There were on his part the small gallantries of
daily life, and on hers the responsiveness of a not very prudish widow
quite willing to be adored. She played the piano. It was enough: the
needy Petrarch had found a sufficient Laura--and never was a poet's
goddess worshiped in such singular strains. We miss in them altogether
that captivating simplicity which the young Goethe, and later the young
Heine, caught from the songs of the people. Schiller is always in
pursuit of the intense, the extraordinary, the ecstatic, and sometimes
fails to impress through sheer superabundance of the impressive. His