Schiller, I bless you: to you am I indebted for the holy moments of my early youth. How many tears flowed from my eyes over your poems! What an altar I erected to you in my soul! You are preeminently the poet of youth. The same visionary gaze bent solely on the future — ‘There, there! ’ — the same generous, captivating, vigorous emotions; the same love of human beings and the same affinity for what is novel… Having once taken Schiller in my hands I could not relinquish him and now, in moments of sorrow, his pure and simple song is my remedy.” Later, Alexander Herzen advised his children to read and reread Schiller’s works, saying, “Good books grow along with us.”