the line which separates sense from nonsense, genius from insanity.  Hebbel was restive under criticism, and the method of his polemics tended rather to exasperate than to conciliate his adversaries.  Meanwhile Maria Magdalena and Judith were performed at the Hofburgtheater, with Christine as the heroine.  But in 1850 Heinrich Laube became director of this theatre, and he not only rejected one play of Hebbel’s after another, but also withdrew from Christine the leading parts which she had heretofore taken in the regular repertory.

The new epoch in Hebbel’s dramatic activity really began in 1848.  The fruits of his sojourn in Italy, A Tragedy in Sicily (1846), Julia (1847), and New Poems (published in 1847) were mediocre stragglers in the train of his first successes.  But Herodes and Mariamne, begun in 1847 and completed in November, 1848, is the first of a new series of masterpieces.  Mariamne, Hebbel said, was not simply written for Christine, she was Christine. The Ruby, which followed in the spring of 1849, is a graceful dramatization of a fairy-tale written ten years before in Munich; Michel Angelo (1850), a satire on his critics, is a slight but clever refutation of ignorant presumption. Agnes Bernauer (1851) is a worthy successor of Herodes and Mariamne; Gyges and his Ring (1854) is the most poetic and perhaps the most characteristic of his dramas.  The trilogy on the Nibelungen (1855-1860) was Hebbel’s last great work, ranking with Grillparzer’s Golden Fleece and Schiller’s Wallenstein; and if he had lived to complete Demetrius, we should have had another remarkable drama, on a subject which Schiller too was destined to leave unfinished.

In the fifties, Hebbel accompanied Christine on professional trips to North Germany, and had ample occasion to observe the spread of his influence.  In 1852 he was feted at Munich in connection with the production there of Agnes Bernauer.  In 1858 he attended a performance of Genoveva in Weimar, and was decorated with an order by the Grand Duke.  In 1861 the Nibelungen trilogy was performed for the first time in Weimar, with Christine as Brunhild and Kriemhild; and in the following year Hebbel, who had even thought of going to live at Weimar, was the guest of the Grand Duke at his castle in Wilhelmsthal.  Though in Vienna honors came later, Hebbel felt himself to be during these years at the summit of his existence.  In 1855 he bought a country home at Orth near Gmunden in the Salzkammergut, and to the idyllic atmosphere of that retreat he owed the inspiration for the epic poem Mother and Child (1857), his gentlest treatment of a tragic theme.  In 1857 he issued a definitive edition of his Poems, dedicated to Uhland, “the first poet of the present time.”  In 1854 Genoveva, in modified form, was successfully presented as Magellone at the Burgtheater,