the moment he became a
national hero, especially in the army. His latter years were indeed
years of honor; but the honor came too late. He was given the cross of
the order of Leopold in 1849, was made _Hofrat_ and a member of the
House of Lords in 1856, and received the grand cross of the order of
Franz Josef upon the celebration of his eightieth birthday in 1871. He
died on the twenty-first of January, 1872.

Grillparzer led for the most part a solitary life--for the last third of
his life he was almost a hermit--and he was rather an observer than an
actor in the affairs of men; but nevertheless he saw more of the world
than a mere dreamer would have cared to see, and the circle of his
friends was not inconsiderable. Besides making the trip to Italy,
already alluded to, in 1819, he journeyed in 1826 to North Germany,
seeing Goethe in Weimar, in 1836 to Paris, in 1837 to London, in 1843
down the Danube to Athens, and in 1847 again to Berlin and to Hamburg.
No one of these trips gave him any particular poetic impetus, except
perhaps the first, on which he found in the classical atmosphere of Rome
a refreshing antidote to the romantic miasma which he hated. Nor did he
derive much profit from the men of letters whom he visited in various
places, such as Fouque, Chamisso, and Heine. He dined with Goethe, but
was too bashful to accept an indirect invitation to spend an evening
with Goethe alone. He paid his respects to Uhland, whom he esteemed as
the greatest German poet of that time (1837); but Uhland was then no
longer productive and was never a magnetic personality. Indeed, there
was hardly more than one man, even in Vienna, who exerted a strong
personal influence upon Grillparzer, and this was Josef Schreyvogel,
journalist, critic, playwright, from 1814 to 1831 secretary of the
_Burgtheater_. A happy chance gained for Grillparzer in 1816 the
friendship of this practical theatre manager, and under Schreyvogel's
auspices he prepared his first drama for the stage.

On another side, Grillparzer's character is illumined for us by the
strange story of his relations with four Viennese women. He was not a
handsome man, but tall, with an abundance of blond hair, and bewitching
blue eyes that made him very attractive to the other sex. He, too, was
exceedingly sensitive to sexual attraction and in early youth suffered
torments from the pangs of unsatisfied longing. From the days when he
knew that he was in love, but did not yet kn