Schiller adds that beauty knits together thought and feeling; the fullest
unity of spirit and matter. Its freedom is not lack, but harmony, of
laws; its conditions are not exclusions, inclusion of all infinity
determined in itself. A true work of art generates lofty serenity and
freedom of mind. Thus the aesthetic disposition bestows on us the
highest of all gifts, that of a disposition to humanity, and we may call
beauty our second creator.

In these letters Schiller spoke out the mildest and highest sentiments on
art, and in his paper on Simple and Sentimental Poetry (1795) he
constructs the ideal of the perfect poet. This is by far the most
fruitful of Schiller's essays in its results. It has much that is
practically applicable, and contains a very able estimate of German
poetry. The writing is also very pointed and telling, because it is
based upon actual perceptions, and it is interesting because the contrast
drawn out throughout it between the simple and the sentimental has been
referred to his own contrast with Goethe. He also wished to vindicate
modern poetry, which Goethe seemed to wish to sacrifice to the antique.

The sentimental poetry is the fruit of quiet and retirement; simple
poetry the child of life. One is a favor of nature; the sentimental
depends on itself, the simple on the world of experience. The
sentimental is in danger of extending the limits of human nature too far,
of being too ideal, too mystical. Neither character exhausts the ideal
of humanity, but the intimate union of both. Both are founded in human
nature; the contradictions lying at their basis, when cleared in thought
from the poetical faculty, are realism and idealism. These also are
sides of human nature, which, when unconnected, bring forth disastrous
results. Their opposition is as old as the beginning of culture, and