In the spring of the year 1797, as 'Hermann and Dorothea' was approaching completion, Goethe and Schiller were led to an interchange of views concerning the distinctive qualities of epic poetry. Their discussion begot an interest in the kindred type of the ballad, which may be regarded as a miniature epic in a lyrical form. The result was that both poets began to make ballads for the next year's 'Almanac'. Schiller contributed five: 'The Diver', 'The Ring of Polycrates', 'The Cranes of Ibycus', 'The Errand at the Furnace' and 'The Knight of Toggenburg'. In subsequent years he wrote three others: 'The Pledge', 'Hero and Leander' and 'The Count of Hapsburg'. To these may be added 'The Glove ', which was not called a ballad because not written in uniform stanzas, and 'The Fight with the Dragon ', which was called a 'romanza'.
These poems, taken as a whole, owe nothing whatever to the folk-song. The popular ballad, which had once fascinated Goethe and Herder and Bürger, and the Göttingen poets generally, seems never to have appealed to Schiller in any notable degree. If we except 'The Count of Hapsburg', his ballad themes are all exotic, that is, they do not deal with German legend or history or superstition. The suggestions came generally from out-of-the-way reading, and in one or two cases his exact source has not been certainly identified. The tales have no odor of the soil, no local color. They make no use of the supernatural, the gruesome or the uncanny. They are not wild roses, but jaqueminots cultivated with an aesthetic end in view. Their aroma is distinctly literary, and they are all eminently serious. Not a smile is provided for in the whole list. There is no element of mystery about them. The passions and sentiments illustrated are of the universal kind. And just as vague, uncanny and bizarre feelings play no part, so there is no resort to verbal tricks, such as meaningless repetitions, or onomatopoetic jingles. The language is dignified and classical. Their great merit is the vivid and strong imaginative coloring with which situations and actions are portrayed. While in no sense folk-songs, they have always been great favorites with the German people.
In 'The Diver' the stress falls upon the portraiture of the raging deep and its awful horrors. It is a rhetorical _Prachtstück_, which has done good service to many an elocutionist and declaiming schoolboy. Schiller himself had never seen the sea, nor any body of water remotely resembling the Charybdis of the poem. Observation, as he humbly confessed, had given him nothing more awesome than a mill-dam,--the rest was Homeric and imaginative; wherefore it no doubt gratified him when Goethe reported from Schaffhausen, after a visit to the cataract, that the line