He did not wish to return
to his own province; indeed he could not return--that would have been
death. It was necessary that this boy of seventeen should find some
means of earning a livelihood and be able to instruct himself at the
same time. After his expulsion from the Conservatoire he attended no
other school; he taught himself. And he taught himself wonderfully; but
at what a cost! The suffering he went through from that time until he
was thirty, the enormous amount of energy he had to expend in order to
live and cultivate the fine spirit of poetry that was within him--all
this effort and toil was, without doubt, the cause of his unhappy death.
He had a burning thirst for knowledge and a fever for work which made
him sometimes forget the necessity for eating and drinking.
He had a great admiration for Goethe, and was infatuated by Heinrich von
Kleist, whom he rather resembles both in his gifts and in his life; he
was an enthusiast about Grillparzer and Hebbel at a time when they were
but little appreciated; and he was one of the first Germans to discover
the worth of Moerike, whom, later on, he made popular in Germany. Besides
this, he read English and French writers.
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