In half-a-dozen days he began as many ballads, and tore them up one
and all. He beat his brains for plots, and was satisfied with none. He
had a fair maiden, a cruel father, a wicked sister, a handsome knight,
and a castle on the Rhine; and so plunged into a love story with a
moonlight meeting, an escape on horseback, pursuit, capture, despair,
suicide, and a ghostly apparition that floated over the river, and
wrung her hands under the castle window. It seems impossible for an
author to do more for his heroine than take her out of the world, and
bring her back again; but our poet was not content. He had not come
himself to the sentiment of life, and felt a rough boyish disgust at
the maundering griefs of his hero and heroine, who, moreover, were
unpleasantly like every other hero and heroine that he had ever read
of under similar circumstances; and if there was one thing more than
another that Friedrich was determined to be, it was to be original.

He had no half hopes. With the dauntlessness of young ambition, he
determined to do his very best, and that that best should be better
than anything that ever had been done by any one.

Having failed with the sentimental, he tried to write something funny.
Surely such child's tales as Bluebeard, Cinderella, etc., were easy
enough to write. He would make a _Kindeslied_--a child's song. But he
was mistaken; to write a new nursery ballad was the hardest task of
all. Time after time he struggled; and, at last, one day when he had
written and destroyed a longer effort than usual, he went to bed in
hopeless despair.

His disappointment mingled with his dreams. He dreamt that he was in
the bookseller's shop hunting among the shelves for some scraps of
paper on which he had written. He could not find them, he thought, but