To this 'theosophy' Julius adds a few comments, evidently of later origin, which show that he has now become aware of its intellectual inadequacy. Still he does not repudiate it. He thinks it may do for a doctrine, if one's nature is adapted to it.--Herewith, so far as Schiller was concerned, the 'Philosophic Letters' came to an end; but in the spring of 1788, Körner surprised him with a letter by Raphael, which is, philosophically speaking, by far the best of the entire collection. But this book is not concerned with the writings of Körner.
Ere the third number of the _Thalia_ appeared it had become evident that the enterprise would not be profitable, and its perplexed editor was in doubt whether to continue it. He finally decided to go on. When the fourth number came out, early in 1787, it contained the beginning of a novel, 'The Ghostseer', wherein a mysterious Sicilian, and a still more mysterious Armenian, dog the footsteps of a German Prince von ---- living at Venice, and do various things suggesting a connection with occult powers. The first installment of the story broke off at a very exciting point,--just when the Sicilian has produced his amazing ghost-scene, but has not yet been unmasked as a vulgar fraud. Schiller evidently began the novel in no very strenuous frame of mind. He wished to profit by the popular interest in tales of mysterious charlatanry which had been aroused by the exploits of Cagliostro. So he set out to spin a yarn in that vein, but he had no definite plan and did not himself know where he would bring up. The literary merits of 'The Ghostseer', Schiller's most noteworthy attempt in prose fiction, will come up for consideration in connection with the conclusion, or rather the continuation, which he published some two years later, when he had left Dresden to seek his fortune in Weimar.
Even now the necessity of seeking his fortune somewhere was daily becoming more imperious. The _Thalia_ did not pay, though the critics spoke well of it, and he could not live forever upon Körner's friendly advances of money. The sense of his dependence often galled him; and yet when a proposal, in itself highly attractive, came to him from a distant city, he could not pluck up courage to leave his friend. Friedrich Schröder, the greatest German actor of the time, wished to draw him to Hamburg. Schiller looked up to Schröder with genuine admiration and speculatively promised himself great gain from association with 'the one man in Germany who could realize all his ideas of art.' In Mannheim,--so he wrote in October, 1786,--he had lost all his enthusiasm for the theater; it was now beginning to revive, but he shuddered at the treatment to which playwrights were exposed by theatrical people. Moreover he was living at Dresden 'in the bosom of a family to which he had become necessary'. So nothing came of the negotiations except the preparation of a stage version of 'Don Carlos' for the Hamburg theater.