He had not written a ballad, but broken a mug.

"Friedrich can do nothing useful."

He buried his face, and wept bitterly.

In time, his tears were dried, and as it was very early he lay awake
and beat his brains. He had added nothing to his former character but
the breaking of a piece of crockery. Something must be done. No more
funny ballads now. He would write something terrible--miserable;
something that should make other people weep as he had wept. He was in
a very tragic humour indeed. He would have a hero who should go into
the world to seek his fortune, and come back to find his lady-love in
a nunnery; but that was an old story. Well, he would turn it the other
way, and put the hero into a monastery; but that wasn't new. Then he
would shut both of them up, and not let them meet again till one was a
monk and the other a nun, which would be grievous enough in all
reason; but this was the oldest of all. Friedrich gave up love stories
on the spot. It was clearly not his _forte_.

Then he thought he would have a large family of brothers and sisters,
and kill them all by a plague. But, besides the want of further
incident, this idea did not seem to him sufficiently sad. Either from
its unreality, or from their better faith, the idea of death does not
possess the same gloom for the young that it does for those older
minds that have a juster sense of the value of human life, and are,
perhaps, more heavily bound in the chains of human interests.

No; the plague story might be pathetic, but it was not miserable--not