he had human intercourse.  He heard the lectures of Schelling and Goerres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he, gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and philosophy.  His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous narratives and gloomy poems.  At the time of his greatest wretchedness he conceived the plots of comedies, “ridiculing something by the representation of nothing.”  But we note that his reading now begins to suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,—­all of them characters the key to whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the destiny of mankind typified.  Still more directly, however, the tragedy of human life was brought home to him—­not merely through his personal struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau, a dear friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the death of his mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do but little, and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet maker, with whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate terms.  Hebbel’s dramas Judith, Genoveva, and Maria Magdalena all germinated during these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.

But the actual output of these years was not large.  Attempts to publish a volume of poems and a volume of short stories had failed.  Nevertheless, Hebbel was no longer an unknown quantity in the world of letters when, in the early spring of 1839, he decided to return to Hamburg.  Hope of aid from Campe, Heine’s publisher, and from Gutzkow, the editor of a paper published by Campe, encouraged this decision.  But Hebbel was really going home, going back to Elise, after having accomplished the purpose of his pilgrimage, even though for lack of money he could not take with him a doctor’s degree.  He came as a man who could do things for which the world gives a man a living.  The return journey, lasting from the eleventh to the thirty-first of March, 1839, amid alternate freezing and thawing, was a tramp, than which only the retreat from Moscow could have been more frightful; but Hebbel accomplished it, more concerned for the little dog that accompanied him than for his own sufferings.  And it appeared that he had wisely chosen to return; for he found opportunity for critical work in Gutzkow’s Telegraph, and Campe published the works which in rapid succession he now completed:  Judith (1840), Genoveva (1841), The Diamond (1841; printed in 1847), and Poems (1842).