No one could prize decision, unity of character, more than he did, and never was there a more uncertain, divided, morbid man. He was always despairing, always wavering between the highest endeavour and the inclination to commit suicide. This explains how it is that we see him, the greatest of the Romanticists, liable to almost all the errors which distinguish his contemporaries. His own really fine, noble nature was spoiled very much as are most of the characters in his works, by sinister, disastrous peculiarities, which slacken the will and destroy the elasticity of the mind. Yet Heinrich von Kleist has assured himself a place in literature, like all others who have won places there, by the vigour and the passion with which he lived and wrote.[18] In the other notable dramatist of the Romantic School there was far less to disintegrate. He was the genuine Romanticist from the very first. Zacharias Werner was born in Königsberg in 1768. He was the son of a professor at the University, who also held the post of dramatic censor. Hence, even as a child, Zacharias had the opportunity of seeing plays almost daily, and in his earliest youth he was able to make himself acquainted with all the technicalities of the stage. His mother, according to Hoffmann, "was richly endowed with both intellect and imagination." Her mind inclined to earnest, highly imaginative mysticism, and she exercised no inconsiderable influence upon her son's ardent imagination; but in course of time she became insane, one of her delusions being that she herself was the Virgin Mary, and her son the Saviour of the world. As a student, Zacharias, who was of a sanguine, sensual temperament, led an exceedingly dissolute life. In his twentieth year he published a volume of lyric poems, which, like the earliest writings of Friedrich Schlegel and the other Romanticists, are entirely untouched by mysticism; they inveigh, in the style of the eighteenth century, against "sanctimoniousness, pious stupidity, hypocrisy, and Jesuitism." Nevertheless, while still comparatively young, he himself adopted the sanctimonious style. Though he continued to be dissipated, he cannot exactly be called a hypocrite, for he sinned and repented alternately. The distinguishing feature of his character was instability, as he himself confesses in his last poem, _Unstäts Morgenpsalm_ ("The Unstable Man's Morning Hymn"); and long before, in the prologue to Söhne des Thals ("Sons of the Vale"), he had called himself an inconstant creature, "perpetually erring, lamenting, warning."