a woman to whom he cannot be true.  Medea, in too confident self-sufficiency, is not proof against the blandishments of an unscrupulous adventurer and progresses from crime to crime, doing from beginning to end what it is not her will to do.  An unnatural and unholy bond cannot be severed even to make way for a natural and holy one.  And the paths of glory lead not to the grave but to a living death in the consciousness of guilt and the remorse for misdeeds.

Grillparzer never again wrote with such tumultuous passion as swayed him at the time of his work on the first half of The Golden Fleece. His illicit love of Charlotte Paumgarten gave him many a tone which thrills in the narrative of Jason and Medea; the death of his mother brought home to him the tragedy of violence and interrupted his work in the midst of The Argonauts; his visit to Rome enabled him to regain composure and increase his sense of the local color of ancient civilization; so that when he completed Medea, in the fall and early winter of 1819-20, he wrote with the mastery of one who had ventured, suffered, observed, and recovered.  In his own person he had experienced the dangers of the vita activa against which The Golden Fleece is a warning.

Mention has already been made of Grillparzer’s pride in the history of Austria.  In 1809 he wrote in his diary, “I am going to write an historical drama on Frederick the Warlike, Duke of Austria.”  A few stanzas of a ballad on this hero were written, probably at this time; dramatic fragments have survived from 1818 and 1821.  In the first two decades of the nineteenth century vigorous efforts were made, especially by Baron von Hormayr and his collaborators, to stir up Austrian poets to emulate their North-German colleagues in the treatment of Austrian subjects.  With these efforts Grillparzer was in hearty sympathy.  The Hanoverian A.W.  Schlegel declared in a lecture delivered at Vienna in 1808 that the worthiest form of the romantic drama was the historical; and made special mention of the house of Habsburg.  In 1817 Matthaeus von Collin’s play Frederick the Warlike was published, as one of three (Leopold the Glorious, Frederick the Warlike, and Ottocar) planned as a cycle on the house of Babenberg.  Collin’s Frederick interested Grillparzer; Ottocar, who married Frederick’s sister and whose fate closely resembled Frederick’s, appealed to him as a promising character for dramatic treatment; a performance of Kleist’s Prince Frederick of Homburg, which Grillparzer witnessed in 1821, may well have stimulated him to do for the first of the Habsburgs, Ottocar’s successful rival, what Kleist had done for the greatest of the early Hohenzollerns; and particularly the likeness of Ottocar’s career to that of Napoleon gave him the point of view for King Ottocar’s Fortune and Fall, composed in 1823.