divine law in the temple of which she is priestess.  The action of the play therefore takes the form of an intrigue on the part of this representative to thwart the intrigue of Hero and Leander.  This external collision is, however, far from supplying the chief interest in a drama unquestionably dramatic, although its main action is internal.  Hero is at the beginning a Greek counterpart to the barbarian Medea.  She has the same pride of station and self-assurance.  Foreordained to asceticism, she is ready to embrace it because she thinks it superior to the worldliness of which she has no knowledge.  When worldliness presents itself to her in the attractive form of Leander, she is first curious, then offended, apprehensive of danger to herself and to him, only soon to apprehend nothing but interruption of the new rapture to which she yields in oblivion of everything else in the world.  Only a poet of the unprecedented naivete of Grillparzer could so completely obliterate the insurgency of moral scruples against this establishment of the absolute monarchy of love.

In spite of admirable dramatic qualities and the most exquisite poetry even in the less dramatic passages, this play on Hero and Leander disappointed both audience and playwright when it was put upon the stage in April, 1831.  Other disappointments were rife for Grillparzer at this time.  But he put away his desires for the unattainable, and with the publication of Tristia ex Ponto in 1835, took, as it were, formal leave of the past and its sorrow.  Indeed, he seemed on the point of beginning a new epoch of ready production; for he now succeeded, for the first time since 1818, in the quick conception and uninterrupted composition of an eminently characteristic play, the most artistic of German comedies, Woe to the Liar.  It was the more lamentable that when the play was enacted, on the sixth of March, 1838, the brutal behavior of an unappreciative audience so wounded the sensitive poet that he resolved never again to subject himself to such ignominy—­and kept his word.  In 1840 he published Waves of the Sea and of Love, A Dream is Life, and Woe to the Liar; but the plays which he wrote after that time he kept in his desk.

The year 1838, accordingly, sharply divides the life of Grillparzer into two parts—­the first, productive and more or less in the public eye; the second, contemplative and in complete retirement from the stage.  To be sure, the poet became conspicuous once more with his poem to Radetzky in 1848; in 1851 Heinrich Laube, recently appointed director of the Hofburgtheater, instituted a kind of Grillparzer revival; and belated honors brought some solace to his old age.  But he had become an historical figure long before he ceased to be seen on the streets of his beloved Vienna, and the three completed manuscripts of plays that in 1872 he bequeathed to posterity had lain untouched for nearly twenty years.