The journey to Munich Hebbel made afoot, leaving Heidelberg on September 12, 1836. He passed through Strassburg, and thought of Goethe as he climbed the tower of the cathedral; he visited the Suabian poets at Stuttgart and Tübingen, and was deeply disappointed with the kindly but undemonstrative Uhland; and he reached Munich on September the twenty-ninth. Here he remained until March, 1839. Hebbel's two and a half years in Munich, years of solitude, unheard-of privation, illness, and battling against despair, came near to wearing out the physical man, and were, through long-continued insufficient nourishment, the cause of the disease to which he finally succumbed; but they were also the finishing school of the personality that henceforth unflinchingly faced the world and demanded to be heard. Hebbel provided for his material needs partly by journalistic work, to which he was ill-adapted, but chiefly through the limitless bounty of Elise Lensing--for months at a time the only being with whom, and only by correspondence, he had human intercourse. He heard the lectures of Schelling and Görres at the university; but, as at Heidelberg, he, gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Julian the Apostate, the Maid of Orleans, Judith and Holofernes, Golo and Genoveva,--all of them characters the key to whose destiny lay in their personalities, and in whom Hebbel saw the destiny of mankind typified. Still more directly, however, the tragedy of human life was brought home to him--not merely through his personal struggle for existence, but through the death of Emil Rousseau, a dear friend who had followed him from Heidelberg to Munich, the death of his mother, for whose necessities he had of late been able to do but little, and misfortune in the family of Anton Schwarz, a cabinet maker, with whose daughter, Beppy, Hebbel had been on too intimate terms. Hebbel's dramas _Judith_, _Genoveva_, and _Maria Magdalena_ all germinated during these terrible years of the sojourn in Munich.