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 seamy 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