dramatize until in the less exacting forms he had mastered the means of
expression. But everything pointed toward literature as a calling, and
before the year was out Hebbel resolved to migrate to Munich, still, to
be sure, a student, but from the moment of his arrival living there
under the name and title of _Literat_.

The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September
12, 1836. He passed through Strassburg, and thought of Goethe as he
climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at
Stuttgart and Tübingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but
undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the
twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839.

Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of
privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing
out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient
nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed; but
they were also the finishing school of the personality that henceforth
unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard. Hebbel provided
for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to which he was
ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise
Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by
correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the lectures of
Schelling and Görres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he,
gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and
philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous
narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he
conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the
representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to
suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon,