demonstrate the poetic excellence of Kleist and could distinguish in Koerner between the heroic patriot and the mediocre poet; for it was a dramatic masterpiece that Hebbel analyzed in Kleist’s Prince of Hamburg, and in this analysis he formulated views that remained the canons of all his subsequent activity as a playwright.  The study of Kleist gave him for the drama the same sort of illumination that Uhland had given him for lyric poetry.

Though Hebbel was unable to acquire in Hamburg a certificate of preparedness for the university, he soon felt ready for university studies, and after some difficulty persuaded his benefactors to give him the balance of the fund that they had collected, and consent to his going to Heidelberg.  In March, 1836, he departed thither, with less than eighty thalers in his pocket.  He could be admitted only as a special student; nevertheless, he was hospitably received by members of the faculty of law, and attended their lectures.  But the romantic scenery of Heidelberg, and, the reading of Goethe and Shakespeare, whom he now for the first time studied thoroughly, were more fruitful and suggestive to him than jurisprudence, however much he was interested in “cases” as examples of human experience.  Such a “case” he treated in Anna, the first short story with which he was satisfied, and which indeed is worthy of his model in this genre, Kleist.  Other narratives, and a few poems, testify to a closer approach to nature and a less morbid attitude toward life than had appeared in the earlier works.  Hebbel was now finishing his apprenticeship, wisely restraining the impulse to dramatize until in the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of expression.  But everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and before the year was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to be sure, a student, but from the moment of his arrival living there under the name and title of Literat.

The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September 12, 1836.  He passed through Strassburg, and thought of Goethe as he climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at Stuttgart and Tuebingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the twenty-ninth.  Here he remained until March, 1839.

Hebbel’s two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed; but they were also the finishing school of the personality that henceforth unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard.  Hebbel provided for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to which he was ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise Lensing—­for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by correspondence,