The years in Heiligenstadt are of special importance in Storm's whole artistic activity, inasmuch as poetry is gradually pushed into the second place by his prose works. At that time Storm was known to the greater public hardly at all by his lyrics but only by _Immensee_ (1849) and similar tales. Hence he was recognized as the author of lyric stories expressive chiefly of "transfigured resignation." This characterization, however, is only partially justified, for resignation finally disappears from Storm's stories and the share that the lyric element has in his tales changes entirely in the course of time. Of a number of his earlier narratives and sketches it can actually be said that they were written less for the sake of the tale than on account of the mood they express. And, in _Heiligenstadt_, Storm, who in all spheres sought untiringly for pure form, finally reached that kind of prose in which feeling and imagination have the widest scope, the "Märchen." He writes _The Rain-Witch_, perhaps the most perfect artistic fairy tale of German literature, in which he not only surpasses Goethe and the Romanticists but also himself. For, in Storm's own words, his _Hinzelmeier_ is only a "fantastic-allegorical creation," _Bulemann's House_, written in the style of E. T. A. Hoffmann, "an odd story," while _The Mirror of Cyprianus_ appears rather "in the elegant robe of the saga." The last of these works was not finished in Heiligenstadt, but when Storm was back in his old home again. For in March, 1864, he had returned to Husum, where he was given the office of "Landvogt" (district magistrate), to which were attached authority in police matters and the administration of justice. In taking this step he had followed the call of his fellow-citizens, for the death of Frederick VII. of Denmark had once more awakened in the Duchies the hope of freedom. The longed-for happiness of his return, however, was marred; for, instead of becoming independent, Schleswig-Holstein was finally made a Prussian province, and he was still more deeply stricken by a loss in his family. In May, 1865, his wife Konstanze died after the birth of her seventh child. Storm did indeed marry again--his second wife Dorothea Jensen was a friend and relative of his and Konstanze's, and this marriage too was happy--but his further poems bear witness to what he lost in Konstanze. One of his stories, also, _Viola Tricolor_ (1873), deals with the problem how a man can cultivate the memory of his dead wife without doing injury to his love for the living one; he called it a "Selbstbefreiung" (self-justification). The evening of Storm's life was not spent in Husum, where memories threatened to engulf him, but in the village of Hademarschen nearby, whither he moved in 1880, when he retired from office. Here he was destined still to develop abundant artistic activity as a novelist until his death on the fourth of July, 1888.