The Two Paths of Virtue
Two are the pathways by which mankind can to virtue mount upward;If thou should find the one barred, open the other will lie.'Tis by exertion the happy obtain her, the suffering by patience.Blest is the man whose kind fate guides him along upon both!
About this text
The Two Paths of Virtue is in the public domain. This text is taken from The Poems of Schiller — Third period, Project Gutenberg ebook #6796; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Friedrich Schiller, The Two Paths of Virtue, in The Poems of Schiller: Third Period (1805), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #6796, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/schiller-third-period/the-two-paths-of-virtue.html, id L21886.
Form and metre
The Two Paths of Virtue is 4 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Two are the pathways by which mankind can to virtue mount upward; | 16 | ···/···//··/˘·/˘ |
| If thou should find the one barred, open the other will lie. | 14 | ·······/˘·/˘·· |
| 'Tis by exertion the happy obtain her, the suffering by patience. | 17 | ··˘/˘·/˘˘/··/˘·/˘ |
| Blest is the man whose kind fate guides him along upon both! | 14 | ·········˘/··· |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.