and Kitty of Heilbronn, declined by Cotta, fell flat when it was printed in Berlin.  Two volumes of tales, including some masterpieces in this form, hardly fared better; the new numbers in this collection were The Duel, The Beggar Woman of Locarno, and Saint Cecilia.  Again the much-tried poet turned to journalism.  From October, 1810, until March, 1811, with the assistance of the popular philosopher Adam Mueller and the well-known romantic authors Arnim, Brentano, and Fouque, he published a politico-literary journal appearing five times a week.  The enterprise began well, and aroused a great deal of interest.  Gradually, however, the censorship of a government that was at once timid and tyrannical limited the scope and destroyed the effectiveness of the paper, and Kleist spent himself in vain efforts to keep it alive.  The poet now found himself in a desperate predicament, financially ruined by the failure of all his enterprises, and discredited with the government, from which he vainly sought some reparation for the violence done to his journal; worst of all, he found himself without honor at home, where he was looked upon as a ne’er-do-well and a disgrace to the reputation of a fine old military family.  As a last resort he applied for reinstatement in the army, it being a time when Prussia seemed to be girding herself for another struggle with Napoleon.  But the attempt to borrow enough money for his military equipment failed, and he found no sympathy or support on a final visit to his family in Frankfort.  In October, 1811, the patriotic men who had been quietly preparing for the inevitable war of liberation were horrified by the movement of the Prussian government toward another alliance with Napoleon; and Kleist felt it impossible to enter an army that might at any moment be ordered to support the arch-enemy of his country.  His case had become utterly hopeless.

At this juncture the unfortunate poet found what he had so often sought in his crises of despair—­a companion in suicide.  Through Adam Mueller he had become acquainted with Henrietta Vogel, an intelligent woman of romantic temperament, who was doomed by an incurable disease to a life of suffering.  She listened eagerly to Kleist’s suggestions of an escape together from the intolerable ills of life.  The two drove from Berlin to a solitary inn on the shore of the Wannsee, near Potsdam; here Kleist wrote a touching farewell letter to his sister, and, on the afternoon of November 21, 1811, after the most deliberate preparations, the companions strolled into the silent pine woods, where Kleist took Henrietta’s life and then his own.  In the same lonely place his grave was dug, and here the greatest Prussian poet lay forgotten, after the brief, though violent, sensation of his tragic end; half a century elapsed before a Prussian prince set up a simple granite monument to mark the grave.  Ten years passed after Kleist’s death before his last great dramas, Arminius