Konstanze was a really beautiful woman of fine and generous proportions, with large yet delicately modeled features and fresh youthful vigor. Storm himself is described as a man of scarcely medium height, slender and of a somewhat stooping carriage. His appearance can have been impressive only by reason of his bright blue eyes and the high forehead beneath his abundant blond hair. Less irritable than her husband, less passionate and eager in her desires, Konstanze met life more evenly, firmly, and clearly, and thus, though lacking talent of any kind, she exerted a far-reaching and beneficial influence on the poet's nature. "When she came into the room it always seemed to me as if it grew lighter," he once said of her. For some years, during which three sons were born to them, they lived most happily in Husum until the shadow of political events fell across their house. After a vain struggle for freedom, the dukedoms of Schleswig and Holstein were subdued by Denmark; and as Storm, even after their subjection, continued openly to proclaim his German sentiments he finally found himself obliged, in 1853, to leave his home. During the ten years spent in Husum Storm's lyric talent came to full and characteristic development. The influence of Heine's _Book of Songs_, so apparent in the poems of his school and student days, is hardly seen any more. Eichendorff's poems and his novel, _Poets and Their Disciples_, do indeed still echo strongly, and we feel the influence of Mörike's lyrics in this period more clearly than before. But all this is insignificant in comparison with Storm's own creative power and the wealth that flowed to him out of his own life. As he was particularly happy at that time, it is natural that qualities should appear in his work which are too often overlooked in forming an estimate of his character and which were more strongly developed in this period than in any other. It is true that we still hear sad tones, even complaints of lost love and of love's suffering and loneliness, but the majority and the best poems are written in a contented, confident, energetic, even jubilant key. It is his love for his wife, of whom he sang so much, that transfigures life to the poet. Beneath her hand pain is stilled, in her arms life and death are overcome, and her presence turns the alien place into home. Separated from the world and from the day nothing can surpass the moments when he receives from her love's last and highest gifts. To the sound of clear bells on moonlight nights peace on earth and good-will to men seem to descend upon the little family circle over which God himself keeps watch. It was in those days, too, that the poet succeeded in writing his song of "the gray town by the sea" which nature has treated so slightingly and yet so singularly, and to which his whole heart goes out; for it is, after all, his mother town. Indeed, he hails with rejoicing the world,