s
at once timid and tyrannical limited the scope and destroyed the
effectiveness of the paper, and Kleist spent himself in vain efforts
to keep it alive. The poet now found himself in a desperate
predicament, financially ruined by the failure of all his enterprises,
and discredited with the government, from which he vainly sought some
reparation for the violence done to his journal; worst of all, he
found himself without honor at home, where he was looked upon as a
ne'er-do-well and a disgrace to the reputation of a fine old military
family. As a last resort he applied for reinstatement in the army, it
being a time when Prussia seemed to be girding herself for another
struggle with Napoleon. But the attempt to borrow enough money for his
military equipment failed, and he found no sympathy or support on a
final visit to his family in Frankfort. In October, 1811, the
patriotic men who had been quietly preparing for the inevitable war of
liberation were horrified by the movement of the Prussian government
toward another alliance with Napoleon; and Kleist felt it impossible
to enter an army that might at any moment be ordered to support the
arch-enemy of his country. His case had become utterly hopeless.

At this juncture the unfortunate poet found what he had so often
sought in his crises of despair--a companion in suicide. Through Adam
Mueller he had become acquainted with Henrietta Vogel, an intelligent
woman of romantic temperament, who was doomed by an incurable disease
to a life of suffering. She listened eagerly to Kleist's suggestions
of an escape together from the intolerable ills of life. The two drove
from Berlin to a solitary inn on the shore of the Wannsee, near
Potsdam; here Kleist wrote a touching farewell letter to his sister,
and, on the afternoon of November 21, 1811, after the most deliberate
preparations, the companions strolled into the silent pine woods,
where Kleist took Henrietta's life and then his own. In the same
lonely place his grave was dug, and here the greatest Prussian poet
lay forgotten, after the brief, though violent, sensation of his
tragic end; half a century elapsed before a Prussian prince set up a
simple granite monument to mark the grave. Ten years passed after
Kleist's death before his last great dramas, _Arminius_ and the
_Prince of Homburg_, were published, edited by the eminent poet and
critic Ludwig Tieck, who also brought out, in 1826, the first
collection of Kleist's works.