who had seen better days, and, like her sisters, endowed with great artistic talent and practical energy, might have proved the salvation of Grillparzer’s existence as a man if he had been more capable of manly resolution, and she had been less like him in impetuosity and stubbornness.  They became engaged, they made preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of sixty takes lodgings with the Froehlich sisters and, finally, makes Katharina his sole heir.

Grillparzer’s development as a poet and dramatist follows the bent of his Austrian genius.  One of the first books that he ever read was the text to Mozart’s Magic Flute.  Music, opera, operetta, and fairy drama gave the earliest impulse to his juvenile imagination.  Even as a boy he began the voluminous reading which, continued throughout his life, made him one of the best informed men of his time in European literature.  History, natural history, and books of travel are followed by the plays of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, while Gesner’s idyls charm him, and he absorbs the stories and romances of Wieland.  In 1808 he reads the early works of Schiller and admires the ideal enthusiasm of Don Carlos.

[Illustration:  FRANZ GRILLPARZER AND KAETHI FROeHLICH IN 1823]

In 1810 he revolts from Schiller and swears allegiance to Goethe.  In the ensuing years he learns English, Greek, and Spanish; Shakespeare supplants Goethe in his esteem, and he is attracted first to Calderon and then to Lope de Vega in whom, ere long, he discovers the dramatic spirit most closely akin to his.

We read of Grillparzer, as of Goethe, that as a child he was fond of improvising dramatic performances with his playmates.  Occasionally he was privileged to attend an operetta or a spectacular play at one of the minor theatres.  When he reached adolescence he experimented with a large number of historical and fantastic subjects, and he left plans and fragments that, unoriginal as most of them are, give earnest of a talent for scenic manipulation and for the representation of character.  These juvenile pieces are full of reminiscences of Schiller and Shakespeare.  Grillparzer’s first completed drama of any magnitude, Blanca of Castile (1807-09), is almost to be called Schiller’s Don Carlos over again, both as to the plot and as to the literary style—­though of course the young man’s imitation seems like a caricature.  The fragments Spartacus (1810) and Alfred the Great (1812), inspired by patriotic grief for Austria humiliated by Napoleon, are Shakespearean in many scenes, but are in their general disposition strongly influenced by Schiller’s Robbers and Maid of Orleans.  In all three of these pieces, the constant reference to inscrutable fate proves that Grillparzer is a disciple of Schiller and a son of his time.