After figuring as a theatrical architect in Bamberg and conductor of an orchestra in Dresden, he went to Berlin, where he spent the last years of his life as a member of the Kammergericht (one of the principal courts of justice). As was natural, the astonishingly gifted man who could write books, improvise on the piano, compose operas, draw caricatures, and scintillate wit when he was in the humour, became a lion in social circles and a fêted frequenter of the taverns. He devoted a great share of his energy and talent to the observation of his own moods, which he watched closely and described day by day in a kind of diary. Wine, which he only regarded as an exciting stimulant, was in reality much more than this to him. To it he owed much of his inspiration, his visions, those hallucinations which at first were fanciful, but became ever more serious. In his case intoxication actually produced a new kind of fantastic poetry. When under the influence of alcohol, he saw the darkness suddenly illuminated by phosphorescent light, or saw a gnome rise through the floor, or saw himself surrounded by spectres and terrible grimacing figures, which went on disappearing and reappearing in all kinds of grotesque disguises. It was almost inevitable that this painstaking observer of his own moods and of the external peculiarities, more especially the oddities, of other men, should care little about nature. If he took a walk in summer, it was only to reach some place or other where he would be certain to meet human beings; and he seldom passed a pastry-cook's or a tavern without dropping in to see what kind of people frequented it. This explains the striking want of any feeling for fresh, open-air nature in his books. His mind was at home in a tavern, not in forest solitudes. But if his sense of the beauties of nature was weak, his enthusiasm for art was so much the more intense; genuine Romanticist that he is, half of his productions treat of art. The peculiar, Romantic theory of human personality held by a poet of this temperament and this development was a product of over-impressionable and over-strained nerves and of irregular living. In his diary I find the following memoranda:-- "1804.--Drank Bischof at the new club from 4 to 10. Frightfully agitated in the evening. Nerves excited by the spiced wine. Possessed by thoughts of death and Doppelgänger. "1809.--Seized by a strange fancy at the ball on the 6th; I imagine myself looking at my Ego through a kaleidoscope--all the forms moving round me are Egos, and annoy me by what they do and leave undone. "1810.--Why do I think so much, sleeping and waking, about madness?"