rederick the Great, and Bismarck, rather
than poets and artists. Even among the notable writers of this region,
intellectual power has usually predominated over gifts of feeling or
of imagination; the arid, formal talent of Gottsched is an exemplary
instance, and the singularly cold and colorless mind of the greatest
thinker of modern times, Immanuel Kant, seems eminently Prussian in
quality. Growing out of such traditions and antecedents as these, the
genius of Heinrich von Kleist appears as a striking anomaly.

This first great literary artist of Prussia was descended from a
representative Prussian family of soldiers, which had numbered
eighteen generals among its members. Heinrich von Kleist was born
October 18, 1777, at Frankfort-on-the-Oder, in the heart of
Brandenburg, where his father was stationed as a captain in the
service of Frederick the Great. The parents, both of gentle birth,
died before their children had grown to maturity. Heinrich was
predestined by all the traditions of the family to a military career;
after a private education he became, at the age of fourteen, a
corporal in the regiment of guards at Potsdam.

[Illustration: #HEINRICH VON KLEIST IN HIS TWENTY-FOURTH YEAR# Made
after a miniature presented by the poet to his bride]

The regiment was ordered south for the Rhine campaign against the
French revolutionists, but the young soldier saw little actual
fighting, and in June, 1795, his battalion had returned to Potsdam; he
was then an ensign, and in his twentieth year was promoted to the rank
of second lieutenant.

The humdrum duties and the easy pleasures of garrison life had no
lasting charms for the future poet, who was as yet unconscious of his
latent power, but was restlessly reaching out for a wider and deeper
experience. We soon find him preparing himself, by energetic private
study, for the University; in April, 1799, against the wishes of his
family and his superior officers, he obtained a discharge from the
army and entered upon his brief course as a student in his native
city. He applied himself with laborious zeal to the mastery of a wide
range of subjects, and hastened, with pedantic gravity, to retail his
newly won learning to his sisters and a group of their friends. For
the time being, the impulse of self-expression took this didactic
turn, which is very prominent also in his correspondence. Within the
year he was betrothed to a member of this informal class, Wilhelmina
von Z