study of Kleist gave him for the drama the same
sort of illumination that Uhland had given him for lyric poetry.

Though Hebbel was unable to acquire in Hamburg a certificate of
preparedness for the university, he soon felt ready for university
studies, and after some difficulty persuaded his benefactors to give him
the balance of the fund that they had collected, and consent to his
going to Heidelberg. In March, 1836, he departed thither, with less than
eighty thalers in his pocket. He could be admitted only as a special
student; nevertheless, he was hospitably received by members of the
faculty of law, and attended their lectures. But the romantic scenery of
Heidelberg, and, the reading of Goethe and Shakespeare, whom he now for
the first time studied thoroughly, were more fruitful and suggestive to
him than jurisprudence, however much he was interested in "cases" as
examples of human experience. Such a "case" he treated in _Anna_, the
first short story with which he was satisfied, and which indeed is
worthy of his model in this _genre_, Kleist. Other narratives, and a few
poems, testify to a closer approach to nature and a less morbid attitude
toward life than had appeared in the earlier works. Hebbel was now
finishing his apprenticeship, wisely restraining the impulse to
dramatize until in the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of
expression. But everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and
before the year was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to
be sure, a student, but from the moment of his arrival living there
under the name and title of _Literat_.

The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September
12, 1836. He passed through Strassburg, and thought of Goethe as he
climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at
Stuttgart and Tuebingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but
undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the
twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839.

Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of
privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing
out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient
nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed; but
they were also the finishing school of the personality that henceforth
unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard. Hebbel provided
for his material nee