But if this can be borne, perhaps the last and most fearful shock awaits him; the tenderest strings of his soul are to be still more cruelly rent, and the wound, which before smarted almost to madness, rendered at once incurable. There are finer and more exalted ties, comprehending the best feelings, the dearest relations of which our natures are capable. Their severing is accompanied by sensations to which the wound of violated friendship itself is feeble, and, to minds of a certain frame, communicates that deadly stroke to which the power of all other human evils would have been inadequate. Such are those which unexpected treachery, from that quarter where the soul had gathered up its best and tenderest hope, must call forth; and few are the hearts round the ruggedness of whose nature so little of the softer feelings are entwined, as not to feel the full keenness of that wound which the tearing of the ties of love inflicts, though its firmness had been inaccessible to the force of common calamities. The distress is more complicate and hopeless, from its nature, than any other; and the pangs of a thousand discordant passions are crowded and concentrated into that terrible moment which discovers infidelity, where the confiding heart had fondly rested all its prospects of happiness. Under other strokes of calamity, the soul gains force and dignity from the greatness of unmerited misfortunes, and rouses every latent power to combat against evil fate. In the school of distress, the energies of the mind are disclosed; and, learning our own powers, we combat against the oppression of adversity till we are able to contemn it. But here the sufferer finds himself as it were waked suddenly from a dream of happiness to intolerable misery; with his mind unnerved and weakened by passion, all the resources of fortitude lying dormant, every tender sensation doubly acute, every softening feeling alive. From the object of tenderness and idolatry of one who was the world to him, he at once finds himself a deserted and despised being; he sees his best and finest feelings blasted for ever, his honest sources of pleasure and peace cut off at one stroke; with the terrible aggravation, that the hand to which alone he could look for comfort and healing under the wound of calamity, instead of being stretched out to save him, itself lodges the dagger in his breast. He is now alone. The ties which bound him to existence, cruelly loosened before, are torn for ever by this last, worst stroke. The prospect which before warmed his heart, is narrowed and darkened on every side. The journey of life is before him, dreary and comfortless. The weary path of rugged labour remains to be trodden, when the motives of activity and the rewards of exertion have ceased to exist; when the keenness of expectation can no longer be stimulated, and the spirit of enterprise has subsided into sullen indifference. While he ruminates with agony on the past, he cheerlessly looks forward into a gloomy futurity; and his foreboding mind sees, in the ruin of his first and fondest hopes, the nothingness of the visions of imagination, the destruction of the thousand little schemes and prospects suggested by an honest ambition, which the exultation of a heart untouched by calamity had fondly and fearlessly indulged. The recollection of those delusions which cheated his unsuspecting youth, whispers for ever that safety is alone compatible with apathy, and cases his heart in impenetrable suspicion. A line of separation is drawn between him and his species. Deceived, insulted, wounded, from that quarter where his heart had treasured up all hope, where his ideas of human excellence had all concentered, confidence in mankind is, in his eyes, the weakness of despicable folly, or the extreme of desperate madness. The principles of the soul, already unsettled, are soon shaken to their foundation. The milk of human kindness turns fast to gall. While those very passions, that frame of mind, which operated the first delusion, which stamped the features of unbounded friendship, of enthusiastic beneficence, now all subverted, are applied to exalt the violence of the opposite character. Under this stroke, the self-love, which might bear up against the common weight of calamity, receives an incurable and rankling wound, over which the soul gloomily broods. The passions of the misanthrope, still flaming with violence, tend, as to a centre, to the aggravation of abhorrence and distrust of his species; and he hates, with a keenness and acrimony proportioned to the strength of disappointed feeling which marked his entrance into life. THE SPECULATOR, No. 14, May 11, 1790. No. CXLV. O, Fear, I know thee by my throbbing heart, COLLINS. THE passions which the German tragedy is, in general, most calculated to excite, are those in which terror predominates. The tenderer strokes of pure pathos which soften the heart with the melting emotions of pity, though sometimes intermingled in a manner the most touching, are diffused with a more sparing hand. The writer who now claims our attention, though possessed of powers to move the softer, finer feelings of the soul, has delighted to exert the energy of his genius in that province of the drama where the great and terrible bear sway. Schiller, the subject of the present paper, is one of the modern tragic writers of Germany, and commenced his dramatic career with a piece called "the Robbers." At a later period the famous conspiracy of "Fiesko" against the government of Genoa, furnished him with the groundwork of a second tragedy. A story of domestic calamity worked into a drama called " Cabal |