Of these last the weightiest is the one at first called simply 'Elegy', and later 'The Walk'. Just as Goethe had used the elegiac meter for his reminiscences of Rome, so Schiller employs it for his impressions of such small travel as fate permitted him,--a summertime walk in field or forest. The verses will bear comparison very well with the 'Roman Elegies'. Instead of paintings, statues, marble palaces and the troublesome Amor, we have the aspects of nature,--the music of bird and bee, and the toil of the husbandman 'not yet awakened to freedom'. As our sauntering poet comes in sight of a city,--the locus of the poem is the neighborhood of Jena, with reminiscent and imaginative touches here and there,--he is moved to reflections upon the more eager life of the townspeople. This leads to a retrospective survey of the origins of civilization,--of agriculture, the mechanical crafts, trade, letters, art, science and the social sentiments. Then the darker side of the picture is developed,--the evils, inhumanities, corruptions and vices of civilized life. For some time the wanderer pursues his way completely lost in these sad contemplations; then suddenly he returns to the present and finds himself alone with nature, from whose 'pure altar' he receives back again the joyousness of youth. Thus the poem ends, like 'The Ideal and Life', upon an idyllic note; the one pointing forward, beyond the warfare of life, to an unimaginable Elysium, the other pointing backward to a happy golden age of which Mother Nature is the living reminder:
Ever the will of man is changing the rule and the purpose, Ever the genius of life alters the form of his deed. But in eternal youth, in ever varying beauty, Thou, O Mother of Men, keepest the ancient law.... Under the selfsame blue, over the same old green, Wander together the near, and wander the far-away races, And old Homer's sun, lo! it shines on us now.
The inner form of 'The Walk'--loving contemplation of nature, giving rise to general reflections upon life--is essentially Goethean; one may safely regard it as a conscious experiment in Goethe's manner. As such it is very good indeed, although its exotic meter has stood in the way of its attaining the popularity of the ballads and the 'Song of the Bell'. 'The Walk' and 'The Ideal and Life' are the noblest gifts of Schiller's didactic muse.