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This was a German, Adolf Koerner by name, who had been a clerk in my father's concern for a number of years, and had just been admitted junior partner. My father placed every confidence in him, and often declared that he had the best idea of business he had ever met with.
When Koerner fell in love with the amiable Minna and wished to marry her, he met with opposition in his own family, who thought that the 'engraver's mamsell' was not good enough for him. This little touch of adversity converted him from a gentleman of leisure and a browsing philosopher into a man with a purpose in life. He set about making himself independent of the family wealth.
How lovely she looked! My heart melted, and I was just on the point of forgiving her when the voice of Koerner became audible from below, calling out "Mrs. Koerner!" I tore myself away from her, and cried passionately, "You don't love me! you love him! go to him!"
Certainly, if I had not descended the secret passage, Koerner would have been killed, and perhaps my Juliet likewise the mother of my children. But should I have been led on to stab him myself, with the poisoned dagger, had the portier not been there? Juliet smiles and says No, and I am glad to agree with her.
'Don Carlos' and some of the prose writings also underwent revision at the hands of their author. The first edition calling itself complete was that of Koerner, which was published in 1812-15, in twelve volumes, by Cotta of Stuttgart. Koerner divided the poems into three periods, a division which has since been extensively copied.
We are tempted to lift the veil that hides the unknown, at least with the furtive hand of conjecture; to imagine a field of unquenched activity where the early dead, free from the clogs and trammels of the lower world, may follow out the impulses of their diviner nature, where Andrea has no wife, and Raphael and Van Dyck no disease, where Keats and Shelley have all eternity for their lofty rhyme, where Ellsworth and Koerner and the Lowell boys can turn their alert and athletic intelligence to something better than war.
For him, as for the poets always, from Homer down, history resolved itself into the doings of the leaders. For the time being, however, the new zeal seems to have been a mere flash in the pan, that set nothing in motion. Nor was Koerner able, for some time to come, to induce his friend to make a serious study of Kant's 'Critique', though every third word between them was of philosophy.
The next day he wrote a letter to Koerner, who had returned to Dresden, describing an incident of the return journey, a letter so full of instruction with regard to the Schiller of this period that it deserves to be quoted at some length: Somehow we came to speak of plans for the future. My heart grew warm. It was not idle dreaming.
Koerner evidently felt that he was in some danger of becoming an intellectual Sybarite, and he hoped that Schiller's example would save him from this danger by spurring him to literary effort.
'At my time of life', he remarked in a letter to Koerner, 'the choice of a subject is far more difficult; the levity of mind which enables one to decide so quickly in one's youth is no longer there, and the love, without which there can be no poetic creation, is harder to arouse. Ere long, having a mind to try his hand upon a tragedy in 'the strictest Greek form', he was musing upon that which in time came to be known as 'The Bride of Messina'.
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