Friedrich had read many of the verses of the Cobbler Poet, but the name of Hans Sachs awakened no thought in his mind.  He had heard nothing of that speech but one sentence, and it decided him.

Friedrich can do nothing useful. “I will see what I can do,” he said, and walked hastily away.  Down the garden, out into the road, away to the mill, where he could stand by the roaring water and talk aloud without being heard.

“Friedrich can do nothing useful.  Yes, I will write a ballad.”

He went home, got together some scraps of paper, and commenced.

In half-a-dozen days he began as many ballads, and tore them up one and all.  He beat his brains for plots, and was satisfied with none.  He had a fair maiden, a cruel father, a wicked sister, a handsome knight, and a castle on the Rhine; and so plunged into a love story with a moonlight meeting, an escape on horseback, pursuit, capture, despair, suicide, and a ghostly apparition that floated over the river, and wrung her hands under the castle window.  It seems impossible for an author to do more for his heroine than take her out of the world, and bring her back again; but our poet was not content.  He had not come himself to the sentiment of life, and felt a rough boyish disgust at the maundering griefs of his hero and heroine, who, moreover, were unpleasantly like every other hero and heroine that he had ever read of under similar circumstances; and if there was one thing more than another that Friedrich was determined to be, it was to be original.

He had no half hopes.  With the dauntlessness of young ambition, he determined to do his very best, and that that best should be better than anything that ever had been done by any one.

Having failed with the sentimental, he tried to write something funny.  Surely such child’s tales as Bluebeard, Cinderella, etc., were easy enough to write.  He would make a Kindeslied—­a child’s song.  But he was mistaken; to write a new nursery ballad was the hardest task of all.  Time after time he struggled; and, at last, one day when he had written and destroyed a longer effort than usual, he went to bed in hopeless despair.

His disappointment mingled with his dreams.  He dreamt that he was in the bookseller’s shop hunting among the shelves for some scraps of paper on which he had written.  He could not find them, he thought, but came across the Petrarch volumes in their beautiful binding.  He opened one and saw—­not a word of that fair-looking Italian, but—­his own ballad that he could not write, written and printed in good German character with his name on the title-page.  He took it in his hands and went out of the shop, and as he did so it seemed to him, in his dream, that he had become a man.  He dreamt that as he came down the steps, the people in the street gathered round him and cheered and shouted.  The women held up their children to look at him; he was a Great Man!  He thought that he turned back into the shop and went up to the counter.  There sat the smiling little bookseller as natural as life, who smiled and bowed to him, as Friedrich had a hundred times seen him bow and smile to the bearded men who came in to purchase.