In the fall of 1844 Hebbel journeyed from Paris to Rome.  He had met few notables in Paris—­Heine, Felix Bamberg, and Arnold Ruge almost complete the tale—­but in Italy he, like Goethe, made the acquaintance of a group of German artists, and followed their leadership in the study of ancient art.  He enjoyed this study in natural, unaffected appreciation of the beautiful; and a certain artistic polish distinguishes the poems which nature and art in Italy inspired him to write.  The Italian journey, however, was far from being a renaissance to him as it had been to Goethe.  Hebbel remained a Northern artist.  Vesuvius impressed him, but Pompeii proved a disappointment; it was laid out, he said, like any other city.  He departed from Rome in October, 1845, richer in the friendship of distinguished men—­including Hermann Hettner—­and in accumulated experience, but not as one to whom the Ponte Molle is a bridge of sighs.

Hebbel’s design was to return to Hamburg by way of Vienna.  In Vienna, which he reached on the fourth of November, 1845, he was cordially received in literary circles.  Men of influence promised their good offices in getting his plays performed, but failed to take effective measures, and he was about to continue his journey when the romantic enthusiasm of two young barons Zerboni gave him an entree into aristocratic society, and he tarried.  Ere long he had decided to stay for life.  In Christine Enghaus, the leading lady at the Hofburgtheater, he found the feminine counterpart to his masculine nature; and on the twenty-sixth of May, 1846, they were married.

From every point of view this marriage proved so perfect that we may well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to stand in the way of it.  To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage—­the more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine; and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her most sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress.  The storm broke, but it cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847, Elise came at Christine’s invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the Hebbel household.

Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and the renewed productivity which followed upon it.  He enjoyed now for the first time not only freedom from economic worries but also complete serenity of mind.  Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up his offensive and defensive warfare.  Beyond the circle of his immediate adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as Ruge, Hettner, and Theodor Vischer, perceived what he was aiming at, and his own public discussions were so abstruse and repellent that it is no wonder they were misunderstood.  Grillparzer declared that he was groping in esthetic fog.  Julian Schmidt recognized his power and the poetic charm of many of his passages, but thought him in danger of crossing