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, Hölty, Bürger, 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 Wãlder_); 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