At this juncture the unfortunate poet found what he had so often sought in his crises of despair--a companion in suicide. Through Adam Müller he had become acquainted with Henrietta Vogel, an intelligent woman of romantic temperament, who was doomed by an incurable disease to a life of suffering. She listened eagerly to Kleist's suggestions of an escape together from the intolerable ills of life. The two drove from Berlin to a solitary inn on the shore of the Wannsee, near Potsdam; here Kleist wrote a touching farewell letter to his sister, and, on the afternoon of November 21, 1811, after the most deliberate preparations, the companions strolled into the silent pine woods, where Kleist took Henrietta's life and then his own. In the same lonely place his grave was dug, and here the greatest Prussian poet lay forgotten, after the brief, though violent, sensation of his tragic end; half a century elapsed before a Prussian prince set up a simple granite monument to mark the grave. Ten years passed after Kleist's death before his last great dramas, _Arminius_ and the _Prince of Homburg_, were published, edited by the eminent poet and critic Ludwig Tieck, who also brought out, in 1826, the first collection of Kleist's works. Long before this time, the patriotic uprising for which he had labored with desperate zeal in his later works, had brought liberation to Germany; it was on the thirty-sixth anniversary of Kleist's birth that Napoleon's power was shaken by the decisive Battle of Leipzig. Heinrich von Kleist was born into a generation that was dominated by the spirit of Romanticism. Tieck and the Schlegels were a few years older, Fouqué was of the same age as he, and Arnim and Brentano somewhat younger. His acquaintance was largely with the authors who represented this tendency. In his own works, however, Kleist was singularly independent of the romantic influence. This is the more remarkable inasmuch as his character had many traits in common with the ardent spirits of the Romantic group. His uncompromising individualism and overweening ambition, his love of travel, his enthusiastic acceptance of Rousseau's gospel of Nature, are characteristically Romantic, and so, we may say, is his passionate patriotism. Eccentricities he had in plenty; there was something morbid in his excessive reserve, his exaggerated secretiveness about the most important interests of his life, as there surely was in his moroseness, which deepened at times into black despair. Goethe was most unpleasantly impressed by this abnormal quality of Kleist's personality, and said of the younger poet: "In spite of my honest desire to sympathize with him, I could not avoid a feeling of horror and loathing, as of a body beautifully endowed by nature, but infected with an incurable disease." That this judgment was unduly harsh is evident enough from the confidence and affection that Kleist inspired in many of the best men of his time.