The Poems and Ballads of Schiller/The Poet to His Friends

by Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller

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THE POET TO HIS FRIENDS;

 

WRITTEN AT WEIMAR.

 

  Friends! yes, the days of oldI grant more fair than those that we behold;And there has lived a race of loftier worth.Could even History cease the past to tell,A thousand stones that truth would chronicleDisburied from the bosom of the earth.But yet that race, if more endowed than ours, Is gone to dusty graves!—we—we survive,We have our charter in the present hours,  We have life's right to live.

  Suns are of happier rayThan where, not ill, we while our life away,If the far-wandering traveller speaks aright;But much which Nature hath to us deniedArt, the kind friend, has lavishly supplied,And warm'd our hearts with sunshine from her light!Tho' native not beneath our winters keen,Or bays or myrtle—still our hands can twineWreaths for our temples of as fair a green,  Won from the clustering vine.

  Well may proud hearts take pleasureWhere the four Regions interchange their treasure,And greedy eyes the pomp of Trade behold,Where Thames receives the thousand sails unfurl'dWhich seek or leave the market of the world—And in his splendour reigns the Earth-god,—GOLD.Yet it is not the streams,—that hurrying pass,Swell'd by the rains, and troubled as they run,But the still waters,—that serenely glass  The image of the sun.¹

  Prouder and more elateThan we o' the North, beside the Angel's Gate²The beggar dwells, and sees eternal Rome! There to his gaze the Beautiful is givenIn all its pomp, and, swelling into heaven,A second heaven, St Peter's wondrous Dome.But Rome in all her glory is a grave,The gorgeous sepulchre of perish'd power.Life only breathes in the fresh plants that wave,  Strewn by the present hour!

  Elsewhere are nobler thingsThan to our souls our scant existence brings:The New beneath the sun hath never been!Yet still we see each grander elder ageBid its great shades revive upon the stage—And give the world its mirror in the scene.³Life but repeats itself, all stale and worn;Sweet Phantasy alone is young for ever;What ne'er and nowhere on the earth was born⁴  Alone grows aged never.

 

¹ These lines afford one of the many instances of the peculiar tenacity with which Schiller retained certain favourite ideas. At the age of seventeen he had said, "Not on the stormy sea, but on the calm and glassy stream, does the sun reflect itself."—See Hoffmeister, Part iv., p. 39.

² St Peter's Church.

³ The signification of these lines in the original has been disputed—I accept Hoffmeister's interpretation—Part vi. p. 40.

⁴ "The light that never was on sea or land.The Consecration and the Poet's Dream."Wordsworth.