amy side of life that he saw, and his own
early necessities had sharpened his sense of the essential tragedy of
existence. Among the young people of the town Hebbel was as active and
inventive as any; he wrote verses, took part in amateur theatricals, and
was a leader in many undertakings that had not amusement as their sole
object.

From the beginning Hebbel shows extraordinary sensitiveness to esthetic
appeal and a disposition to dreamy imaginativeness. The Bible, the
Protestant hymnal, pre-classical prose and poetry of the eighteenth
century, as well as contemporary romantic fiction, including Jean Paul,
Hoffmann, and Heine, touched his fancy and stirred him to emulation.

[Illustration: FRIEDRICH HEBBEL]

As a boy, he is said to have composed a tragedy _Evolia, the Captain of
Robbers_, which his mother confiscated and burned. His early poems are
echoes of Klopstock, Matthisson, Hoelty, Buerger, and other predecessors;
but especially of Schiller, whose moral seriousness and sonorous
language alike inspired the serious and rhetorically gifted youth. The
influence of Schiller, however, marks no epoch in the poetic development
of Hebbel; it dominates the period of adolescence. The sense of poetry
was aroused in him as a boy, he said, by Paul Gerhardt's hymn "The woods
are now at rest" (_Nun ruhen alle Walder_); the discovery of what poetry
is he made in 1830, when he read Uhland's _Minstrel's Curse_ and
perceived that the sole principle of art is not to write, like Schiller,
eloquently about ideas, but "to make in a particular phenomenon the
universal intuitively perceptible."

Having published poems and stories from 1829 on in a local newspaper,
Hebbel, in 1831, seeking a wider audience at the same time that he
longed for a larger sphere of activity, submitted specimens of his work
to Amalie Schoppe in Hamburg, the editress of a fashion paper; and in
this and the following years she printed a considerable number of his
productions. Moreover, she took a genuine personal interest in his
ambitions; and after several plans had proved abortive, she succeeded
in collecting for him a small sum of money and the promise of other
material aid in a plan that should give a firm foundation for the
structure of his hopes: he should come to Hamburg and prepare for the
study of law. Accordingly, on the fourteenth of February, 1835, he left
his modest but secure position in Wesselburen for the alluring great
world where he felt tha