In April, 1802, Kleist realized his romantic dream by taking up his abode, in rural seclusion, on a little island at the outlet of the Lake of Thun, amid the majestic scenery of the Bernese Oberland.  In this retreat, encouraged by the applause of his first confidants, he labored with joyous energy, recasting his Schroffenstein Family, working out the Broken Jug, meditating historical dramas on Leopold of Austria and Peter the Hermit, and expending the best of his untrained genius on the plan of a tragedy, Robert Guiscard, in which he strove to create a drama of a new type, combining the beauties of Greek classical art and of Shakespeare; with his Guiscard the young poet even dared hope to “snatch the laurel wreath from Goethe’s brow.”

Two months of intense mental exertion in the seclusion of his island left Kleist exhausted, and he fell seriously ill; whereupon Ulrica, on receiving belated news of his plight, hastened to Bern to care for him.  When a political revolution drove Ludwig Wieland from Bern, they followed the latter to Weimar, where the poet Wieland, the dean of the remarkable group of great authors gathered at Weimar, received Kleist kindly, and made him his guest at his country estate.  With great difficulty Wieland succeeded in persuading his secretive visitor to reveal his literary plans; and when Kleist recited from memory some of the scenes of his unfinished Guiscard, the old poet was transported with enthusiasm; these fragments seemed to him worthy of the united genius of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Shakespeare, and he was convinced that Kleist had the power to “fill the void in the history of the German drama that even Goethe and Schiller had not filled.”  But in spite of Wieland’s generous encouragement, Kleist found it impossible to complete this masterpiece, and his hopeless pursuit of the perfect ideal became an intolerable obsession to his ambitious and sensitive soul.  He could not remain in Weimar.  In Dresden old friends sought to cheer him in his desperate attempts to seize the elusive ideal; to more than one of them, in his despair, he proposed a joint suicide.  Again he was driven to seek solace and inspiration in travel, a friend accompanying him to Switzerland.  Arrived at Geneva in October, 1803, Kleist fell into the deepest despondency, and wrote Ulrica a letter full of hopeless renunciation.  Half crazed by disappointment and wounded pride, he rushed madly through France to Paris, broke with his friend, who had again repelled a joint suicide, burned his manuscript of Guiscard, and made secretly for Boulogne, hoping to find an honorable death in Napoleon’s projected invasion of England.  Fortunately he fell in with an acquaintance who saved him from the risk of being arrested as a spy, and started him back on his homeward way.  He was detained at Mentz by serious illness, but finally, in June, 1804, reappeared in Potsdam.  The poet’s spirit was broken, and he was glad to accept a petty civil post that took him to Koenigsberg.  After a year of quiet work, he was enabled, by a small pension from Queen Louise, to resign his office and again devote himself to literature.