hostility to these maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life was labor, unproductive use of time was a crime.  He thought it a matter of course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it is little less than a miracle that this did not happen.  The mother, to be sure, fostered the boy’s more ambitious hopes; the death of the father in Hebbel’s fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise; undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel’s boyhood, so far as external events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a real teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his education the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best scholar, to the local magistrate, J.J.  Mohr.

For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr’s employ, first as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and more official business was intrusted.  He lived in the household of his superior, continued in the magistrate’s library the assiduous reading which he had begun with Dethlefsen’s books, and acquired, along with the habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social station than that to which he had been born.  His contact with the world of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook, though it was often the seamy side of life that he saw, and his own early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of existence.  Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, and was a leader in many undertakings that had not amusement as their sole object.

From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to esthetic appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness.  The Bible, the Protestant hymnal, pre-classical prose and poetry of the eighteenth century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul, Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.

[Illustration:  Friedrich hebbel]

As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy Evolia, the Captain of Robbers, which his mother confiscated and burned.  His early poems are echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Hoelty, Buerger, and other predecessors; but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and sonorous language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted youth.  The influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic development of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence.  The sense of poetry was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt’s hymn “The woods are now at rest” (Nun ruhen alle Walder); the discovery of what poetry is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland’s Minstrel’s Curse and perceived that the sole principle of art is not to write, like Schiller, eloquently about ideas, but “to make in a particular phenomenon the universal intuitively perceptible.”