it about their heart's desire.

In 1797 the death of Jean Paul's mother dissolved home bonds and he
soon left Hof forever, though still for a time maintaining diligent
correspondence with the "erotic academy" as well as with new and more
aristocratic "daughters of the Storm and Stress." The writings of this
period are unimportant, some of them unworthy. Jean Paul was for a
time in Leipzig and in Dresden. In October, 1798, he was again in
Weimar, which, in the sunshine of Herder's praise, seemed at first his
"Canaan," though he soon felt himself out of tune with Duchess
Amalia's literary court. To this time belongs a curious _Conjectural
Biography_, a pretty idyl of an ideal courtship and marriage as his
fancy now painted it for himself. Presently he was moved to essay the
realization of this ideal and was for a time betrothed to Karoline von
Feuchtersleben, her aristocratic connections being partially reconciled
to the _mesalliance_ by Richter's appointment as Legationsrat. He
begins already to look forward, a little ruefully, to the time when his
heart shall be "an extinct marriage-crater," and after a visit to
Berlin, where he basked in the smiles of Queen Luise, he was again
betrothed, this time to the less intellectually gifted, but as devoted
and better dowered Karoline Mayer, whom he married in 1801. He was then
in his thirty-eighth year.

Richter's marriage is cardinal in his career. Some imaginative work he
was still to do, but the dominant interests were hereafter to be in
education and in political action. In his own picturesque language,
hitherto his quest had been for the golden fleece of womanhood,
hereafter it was to be for a crusade of men. The change had been
already foreshadowed in 1799 by his stirring paper _On Charlotte
Corday_ (published in 1801).

_Titan_, which Jean Paul regarded as his "principal work and most
complete creation," had been in his mind since 1792. It was begun in
1797 and finished, soon after his betrothal, in 1800. In this novel the
thought of God and immortality is offered as a solution of all problems
of nature and society. _Titan_ is human will in contest with the
divine harmony. The maturing Richter has come to see that idealism in
thought and feeling must be balanced by realism in action if the thinker
is to bear his part in the work of the world. The novel naturally falls
far short of realizing its vast design. Once more the parts are more
than the whole. Some descriptive