never be a great lyrist, but they promise well enough for the poetic
tale. This promise is seen notably in the poem called 'The
Infanticide'. It is a gruesome thing, with the pathos here and there
overstrained, but what a power of vivid narration! What a gift for the
portraiture of frenzied passion! For the rest, it should not go
unrecorded that certain poems of the 'Anthology' went altogether too
far in the defiance of conventional morality. The study of medicine,
combined with the ardor of youthful revolt and the seductions of a new
bohemian life, had so sensualized the mind of Schiller that, for a
brief period in his career, he found pleasure in exploiting the
indecent. It was but a passing phase, and not very bad at its worst.
Still, if Heine, and the other emancipators of the flesh who came
later, had felt the need of supporting their cause by an appeal to
distinguished authority, they might have referred quite unabashed to
the youthful sins of the idealist Schiller.

Little notice was taken of the 'Anthology' even in Suabia, and none at
all, apparently, in the outside German world. The investment brought no
immediate returns in fame or in money, and other experiments of a
different character turned out but little better.

As early as the spring of 1781 Schiller had assumed the editorial charge
of a would-be popular magazine intended to contribute to the 'benefit
and pleasure' of the Suabians. It was a weak provincial affair that soon
died of inanition. The hack-work that Schiller did for it is of no
biographical interest, save that it brought him into connection with
Suabian writers and suggested to him that with a freer hand he might
produce a better journal. In the following year, accordingly, we find
him starting, in conjunction with his friends Abel and Petersen, the
_Wirtemberg Repertory of Literature_. It was to be a quarterly, and bore