After his return to Jena he lectured no more, but threw all his energy into the new journal. He prepared an alluring prospectus and invited the cooperation of all the best writers in Germany. Among these was Goethe, who sent a favorable reply. And thus began a correspondence which presently led, as all the world knows, to an ever memorable friendship. The activities centering in the _Horen_ ushered in a new literary epoch, the epoch of Germany's brief leadership in modern literature.
Thus the period of his Kantian studies, a time of tremendous political excitement in Europe, was for Schiller a quiet period of intense thinking and of eager debate with like-minded friends, upon the abstruse questions of aesthetic theory. The turmoil of the revolution affected him hardly at all. There was nothing of the democrat about him. With all his devotion to liberty and with all his poetic fondness for republicanism, he remained at heart a devoted monarchist. All his life, nearly, he had lived with aristocrats, and he himself had the temper of an aristocrat. There is no evidence in his letters that he ever really sympathized with the French people, even during the early days of the revolution, in their practical program of 'liberty, equality and fraternity'. His notion of liberty was at no time a definite political concept, but always a rainbow in the clouds,--something to rave and philosophize over. Of human brotherhood he had sung most affectingly in the 'Song to Joy', but it was only a poetic kiss that he had ready for all mankind. He would have been amazed if any plebeian stranger had proposed to take him at his word. As for equality, there is no evidence that it entered as a factor or an ideal into his scheme of man's better time to come.
It was thus perfectly natural, when the proceedings were Instituted against the ill-fated Louis the Sixteenth, that Schiller should take the part of the accused. The fierce determination of the French democracy to exact a reckoning from their sovereign, not so much for what _he_ had done as for ages of accumulated wrong, appeared to him the very madness of injustice. In December, 1792, he planned to write a book or a pamphlet in defence of the king, and have it translated into French for the purpose of influencing public opinion in Paris.[89] He seems actually to have begun the work, but the fate of the unlucky Bourbon was swifter than the pen of his German defender. Schiller's horror of the regicide knew no bounds. 'These two weeks past', he wrote on February 8, 1793, 'I can read no more French papers, so disgusted am I with these wretched executioners.' The ensuing events of the Terror intensified this feeling. In speaking of the year 1793, Karoline von Wolzogen has this to say of her brother-in-law: