sceticism, she is ready to embrace
it because she thinks it superior to the worldliness of which she has no
knowledge. When worldliness presents itself to her in the attractive
form of Leander, she is first curious, then offended, apprehensive of
danger to herself and to him, only soon to apprehend nothing but
interruption of the new rapture to which she yields in oblivion of
everything else in the world. Only a poet of the unprecedented _naivete_
of Grillparzer could so completely obliterate the insurgency of moral
scruples against this establishment of the absolute monarchy of love.

In spite of admirable dramatic qualities and the most exquisite poetry
even in the less dramatic passages, this play on Hero and Leander
disappointed both audience and playwright when it was put upon the stage
in April, 1831. Other disappointments were rife for Grillparzer at
this time. But he put away his desires for the unattainable, and with
the publication of _Tristia ex Ponto_ in 1835, took, as it were, formal
leave of the past and its sorrow. Indeed, he seemed on the point of
beginning a new epoch of ready production; for he now succeeded, for the
first time since 1818, in the quick conception and uninterrupted
composition of an eminently characteristic play, the most artistic of
German comedies, _Woe to the Liar_. It was the more lamentable that when
the play was enacted, on the sixth of March, 1838, the brutal behavior
of an unappreciative audience so wounded the sensitive poet that he
resolved never again to subject himself to such ignominy--and kept his
word. In 1840 he published _Waves of the Sea and of Love, A Dream is
Life_, and _Woe to the Liar_; but the plays which he wrote after that
time he kept in his desk.

The year 1838, accordingly, sharply divides the life of Grillparzer into
two parts--the first, productive and more or less in the public eye; the
second, contemplative and in complete retirement from the stage. To be
sure, the poet became conspicuous once more with his poem to Radetzky in
1848; in 1851 Heinrich Laube, recently appointed director of the
_Hofburgtheater_, instituted a kind of Grillparzer revival; and belated
honors brought some solace to his old age. But he had become an
historical figure long before he ceased to be seen on the streets of his
beloved Vienna, and the three completed manuscripts of plays that in
1872 he bequeathed to posterity had lain untouched for nearly twenty
years.

Two of these