Grillparzer led for the most part a solitary life—­for the last third of his life he was almost a hermit—­and he was rather an observer than an actor in the affairs of men; but nevertheless he saw more of the world than a mere dreamer would have cared to see, and the circle of his friends was not inconsiderable.  Besides making the trip to Italy, already alluded to, in 1819, he journeyed in 1826 to North Germany, seeing Goethe in Weimar, in 1836 to Paris, in 1837 to London, in 1843 down the Danube to Athens, and in 1847 again to Berlin and to Hamburg.  No one of these trips gave him any particular poetic impetus, except perhaps the first, on which he found in the classical atmosphere of Rome a refreshing antidote to the romantic miasma which he hated.  Nor did he derive much profit from the men of letters whom he visited in various places, such as Fouque, Chamisso, and Heine.  He dined with Goethe, but was too bashful to accept an indirect invitation to spend an evening with Goethe alone.  He paid his respects to Uhland, whom he esteemed as the greatest German poet of that time (1837); but Uhland was then no longer productive and was never a magnetic personality.  Indeed, there was hardly more than one man, even in Vienna, who exerted a strong personal influence upon Grillparzer, and this was Josef Schreyvogel, journalist, critic, playwright, from 1814 to 1831 secretary of the Burgtheater.  A happy chance gained for Grillparzer in 1816 the friendship of this practical theatre manager, and under Schreyvogel’s auspices he prepared his first drama for the stage.

On another side, Grillparzer’s character is illumined for us by the strange story of his relations with four Viennese women.  He was not a handsome man, but tall, with an abundance of blond hair, and bewitching blue eyes that made him very attractive to the other sex.  He, too, was exceedingly sensitive to sexual attraction and in early youth suffered torments from the pangs of unsatisfied longing.  From the days when he knew that he was in love, but did not yet know with whom, to the time of final renunciation we find him irresolute, ardent, but apparently selfish in the inability to hazard the discovery that the real might prove inferior to his ideal.  Thus his critical disposition invaded even the realm of his affections and embroiled him not merely with the object of them, but also with himself.  Charlotte von Paumgarten, the wife of a cousin of Grillparzer’s, Marie Daeffinger, the wife of a painter, loved him not wisely, but too well; and a young Prussian girl, Marie Piquot, confessed in her last will and testament to such a devotion to him as she was sure no other woman could ever attain, wherefore she commended “her Tasso” to the fostering care of her mother.  Grillparzer had experienced only a fleeting interest in Marie Piquot; so much the more lasting was the attachment which bound him to her successful rival, Katharina Froehlich.  Katharina, one of four daughters of a Viennese manufacturer