ow with whom, to the time of
final renunciation we find him irresolute, ardent, but apparently
selfish in the inability to hazard the discovery that the real might
prove inferior to his ideal. Thus his critical disposition invaded
even the realm of his affections and embroiled him not merely with the
object of them, but also with himself. Charlotte von Paumgarten, the
wife of a cousin of Grillparzer's, Marie Daeffinger, the wife of a
painter, loved him not wisely, but too well; and a young Prussian girl,
Marie Piquot, confessed in her last will and testament to such a
devotion to him as she was sure no other woman could ever attain,
wherefore she commended "her Tasso" to the fostering care of her mother.
Grillparzer had experienced only a fleeting interest in Marie Piquot; so
much the more lasting was the attachment which bound him to her
successful rival, Katharina Froehlich. Katharina, one of four daughters
of a Viennese manufacturer who had seen better days, and, like her
sisters, endowed with great artistic talent and practical energy, might
have proved the salvation of Grillparzer's existence as a man if he had
been more capable of manly resolution, and she had been less like him in
impetuosity and stubbornness. They became engaged, they made
preparations for a marriage which was never consummated and for years
was never definitely abandoned; mutual devotion is ever and anon
interrupted by serious or trivial quarrels, and the imperfect relation
drags on to the vexation of both, until Grillparzer as an old man of
sixty takes lodgings with the Froehlich sisters and, finally, makes
Katharina his sole heir.

Grillparzer's development as a poet and dramatist follows the bent of
his Austrian genius. One of the first books that he ever read was the
text to Mozart's _Magic Flute_. Music, opera, operetta, and fairy drama
gave the earliest impulse to his juvenile imagination. Even as a boy he
began the voluminous reading which, continued throughout his life, made
him one of the best informed men of his time in European literature.
History, natural history, and books of travel are followed by the plays
of Shakespeare, Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, while Gesner's idyls
charm him, and he absorbs the stories and romances of Wieland. In 1808
he reads the early works of Schiller and admires the ideal enthusiasm of
_Don Carlos_.

[Illustration: FRANZ GRILLPARZER AND KAETHI FROeHLICH IN 1823]

In 1810 he revolts from Schiller an