he poet in
Hebbel or Ludwig; but we may be permitted to think of these three
dramatists as not unlike the three suitors for the hand of Libussa:
Grillparzer was rich, Ludwig was wise, and Hebbel was strong. Each of
them was somewhat deficient in the qualities of the other two; each,
however, was a personality, and Hebbel one of the most powerful that
ever lived.

Hebbel's career is a long battle against all but insuperable obstacles.
Born at Wesselburen in the present province of Schleswig-Holstein on
March 18, 1813, he was the son of a poor stone mason--so poor that, as
Hebbel said, poverty had taken the place of his soul. Though Klaus
Hebbel was a well-meaning man, he was a slave to the inexorable _non
possumus_ of penury. In winter, especially, lack of work made even the
provision of daily bread often difficult and sometimes impossible for
him. But Friedrich Hebbel's childhood, full of hardship as it was, was
not cheerless. The father did what he could; and the mother, at whatever
sacrifice to herself, could nearly always do something for the children.
The greatest hardship was caused by the father's hostility to these
maternal concessions to childish desires; for to him, whose life was
labor, unproductive use of time was a crime. He thought it a matter of
course that his son should become a laboring man like himself, and it is
little less than a miracle that this did not happen. The mother, to be
sure, fostered the boy's more ambitious hopes; the death of the father
in Hebbel's fourteenth year was perhaps a blessing in disguise;
undoubtedly the happiest chance in Hebbel's boyhood, so far as external
events are concerned, was the fact that he won the favor of a real
teacher in his schoolmaster Dethlefsen, who not only gave his education
the proper start, but also recommended him, as his best scholar, to the
local magistrate, J.J. Mohr.

For nearly eight years (1827 to 1835) Hebbel was in Mohr's employ, first
as an errand boy, and ultimately as a clerk, to whom more and more
official business was intrusted. He lived in the household of his
superior, continued in the magistrate's library the assiduous reading
which he had begun with Dethlefsen's books, and acquired, along with the
habits of official accuracy, something of the ways of a higher social
station than that to which he had been born. His contact with the world
of affairs and with litigation also considerably broadened his outlook,
though it was often the se