ds partly by journalistic work, to which he was
ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise
Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by
correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the lectures of
Schelling and Goerres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he,
gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and
philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous
narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he
conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the
representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to
suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon,
Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith
and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,--all of them characters the key to
whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the
destiny of mankind typified. Still more directly, however, the tragedy
of human life was brought home to him--not merely through his personal
struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau, a dear
friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the death of his
mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do but little,
and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet maker, with
whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate terms. Hebbel's
dramas _Judith_, _Genoveva_, and _Maria Magdalena_ all germinated during
these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.

But the actual output of these years was not large. Attempts to publish
a volume of poems and a volume of short stories had failed.
Nevertheless, Hebbel was no longer an unknown quantity in the world of
letters when, in the early spring of 1839, he decided to return to
Hamburg. Hope of aid from Campe, Heine's publisher, and from Gutzkow,
the editor of a paper published by Campe, encouraged this decision. But
Hebbel was really going home, going back to Elise, after having
accomplished the purpose of his pilgrimage, even though for lack of
money he could not take with him a doctor's degree. He came as a man who
could do things for which the world gives a man a living. The return
journey, lasting from the eleventh to the thirty-first of March, 1839,
amid alternate freezing and thawing, was a tramp, than which only the
retreat from Moscow could have been more frightful; but Hebbel
accomplished it, more concer