accumulated experience, but not as one to whom the _Ponte Molle_ is a
bridge of sighs.

Hebbel's design was to return to Hamburg by way of Vienna. In Vienna,
which he reached on the fourth of November, 1845, he was cordially
received in literary circles. Men of influence promised their good
offices in getting his plays performed, but failed to take effective
measures, and he was about to continue his journey when the romantic
enthusiasm of two young barons Zerboni gave him an _entrée_ into
aristocratic society, and he tarried. Ere long he had decided to stay
for life. In Christine Enghaus, the leading lady at the
_Hofburgtheater_, he found the feminine counterpart to his masculine
nature; and on the twenty-sixth of May, 1846, they were married.

From every point of view this marriage proved so perfect that we may
well question whether anything whatever ought to have been allowed to
stand in the way of it. To Elise, of course, it seemed an outrage--the
more so that she was entirely mistaken as to the character of Christine;
and with furious bitterness she reproached Hebbel for violating her most
sacred rights in his infatuation for an actress. The storm broke, but it
cleared the air for both; and upon the death of her second son in 1847,
Elise came at Christine's invitation to Vienna and spent a year in the
Hebbel household.

Hebbel himself rightly dated an epoch in his life from his marriage and
the renewed productivity which followed upon it. He enjoyed now for the
first time not only freedom from economic worries but also complete
serenity of mind. Outwardly, indeed, he still had to keep up his
offensive and defensive warfare. Beyond the circle of his immediate
adherents, only the more enlightened of his contemporaries, such as