East wind and rain. Went as far as Valloroed in a furious wind. The sky kept clear; a dark red patch of colour showed the position of the Sun on the horizon. The Moon has got up hurriedly, has turned from red to yellow, and looks lovely. I am drunk with the beauties of Nature. Go to Folehave and feel, like the gods in Homer, without a care....

I can never get sleepy out in the open country on a windy night. Rested a little, got up at four o'clock, went at full speed along soaked roads to Humlebaek, to Gurre Ruins and lake, through the woods to Fredensborg park, back to Humlebaek, and came home to Rungsted by steamer. Then went up on the hill. Quiet beauty of the landscape. Feeling that Nature raises even the fallen into purer, loftier regions. Took the Odyssey and went along the field-path to the stone table; cool, fresh air, harmony and splendour over Nature. "Wildly soars the hawk." Went up into the sunlit wood at Hoersholm, gazed at the melancholy expression in the faces of the horses and sheep.

I made ducks and drakes and asked the others riddles. A woman came and begged for help to bury her husband; he had had such an easy death. (She is said to have killed him with a blow from a wooden shoe.) Sat under a giant beech in Rungsted Wood; then had a splendid drive after the heavy rain up to Folehave and thence to Hoersholm. Everything was as fresh and lovely as in an enchanted land. What a freshness! The church and the trees mirrored themselves in the lake. The device on my shield shall be three lucky peas. [Footnote: There seems to be some such legendary virtue attached in Denmark to a pea-pod containing three or nine peas, as with us to a four-leaved clover.—[Translator's note.]] To Vedbaek and back. We were going for a row. My hostess agreed, but as we had a large, heavy and clumsy boat, they were all nervous. Then Ludvig's rowlock snapped and he caught a crab. It was no wonder, as he was rowing too deep. So I took both sculls myself. It was tiring to pull the heavy boat with so many, but the sea was inexpressibly lovely, the evening dead calm. Silver sheen on the water, visible to the observant and initiated Nature-lover. Ripple from the west wind (GREEK: phrhix).

Grubbed in the shingle, and went to Folehave. Gathered flowers and strawberries. My fingers still smell of strawberries.

Went out at night. Pictures of my fancy rose around me. A Summer's night, but as cold as Winter, the clouds banked up on the horizon. Suppose in the wind and cold and dark I were to meet one I know! Over the corn the wind whispered or whistled a name. The waves dashed in a short little beat against the shore. It is only the sea that is as Nature made it; the land in a thousand ways is robbed of its virginity by human hands, but the sea now is as it was thousands of years ago. A thick fog rose up. The birches bent their heads and went to sleep. But I can hear the grass grow and the stars sing.

Gradually my association with Ludvig David grew more and more intimate, and the latter proved himself a constant friend. A few years after our friendship had begun, when things were looking rather black for me, my father having suffered great business losses, and no longer being able to give me the same help as before, Ludvig David invited me to go and live altogether at his father's house, and be like a son there—an offer which I of course refused, but which affected me deeply, especially when I learnt that it had only been made after the whole family had been consulted.

X.

In November, 1859, at exactly the same time as Kappers' "literary and scientific" society was started, a fellow-student named Groenbeck, from Falster, who knew the family of Caspar Paludan-Mueller, the historian, proposed my joining another little society of young students, of whom Groenbeck thought very highly on account of their altogether unusual knowledge of books and men.

In the old Students' Union in Boldhusgade, the only meeting-place at that time for students, which was always regarded in a poetic light, I had not found what I wanted. There was no life in it, and at the convivial meetings on Saturday night the punch was bad, the speeches were generally bad, and the songs were good only once in a way.

I had just joined one new society, but I never rejected any prospect of acquaintances from whom I could learn anything, and nothing was too much for me. So I willingly agreed, and one evening late in November I was introduced to the society so extolled by Groenbeck, which called itself neither "literary" nor "scientific," had no other object than sociability, and met at Ehlers' College, in the rooms of a young philological student, Frederik Nutzhorn.

Expecting as I did something out of the ordinary, I was very much disappointed. The society proved to be quite vague and indefinite. Those present, the host, a certain Jens Paludan-Mueller, son of the historian, a certain Julius Lange, son of the Professor of Pedagogy, and a few others, received me as though they had been waiting for me to put the society on its legs; they talked as if I were going to do everything to entertain them, and as if they themselves cared to do nothing; they seemed to be indolent, almost sluggish. First we read aloud in turns from Bjoernson's Arne, which was then new; a lagging conversation followed. Nutzhorn talked nonsense, Paludan-Mueller snuffled, Julius Lange alone occasionally let fall a humorous remark. The contrast between Nutzhorn's band, who took sociability calmly and quietly, and Kappers' circle, which met to work and discuss things to its utmost capacity, was striking. The band seemed exceedingly phlegmatic in comparison.

This first impression was modified at subsequent meetings. As I talked to these young men I discovered, first and foremost, how ignorant I was of political history and the history of art; in the next place, I seemed, in comparison with them, to be old in my opinions and my habits. They called themselves Republicans, for instance, whereas Republicanism in Denmark had in my eyes hitherto been mere youthful folly. Then again, they were very unconventional in their habits. After a party near Christmas time, which was distinguished by a pretty song by Julius Lange, they proposed—at twelve o'clock at night!—that we should go to Frederiksborg. And extravagances of this kind were not infrequent.

Still it was only towards midsummer 1860 that I became properly merged into the new circle and felt myself at home in it. It had been increased by two or three first-rate fellows, Harald Paulsen, at the present time Lord Chief Justice, a courageous young fellow, who was not afraid of tackling any ruffian who interfered with him in a defile; Troels Lund, then studying theology, later on the esteemed historian, who was always refined, self-controlled, thoughtful, and on occasion caustic, great at feints in the fencing class; and Emil Petersen, then studying law (died in 1890, as Departmental Head of Railways), gentle, dreamy, exceedingly conscientious, with a marked lyric tendency.

One evening, shortly before Midsummer's eve, when we had gone out to Vedbaek, fetched Emil Petersen from Tryggeroed and thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful scenery, we had a wrestling match out in the water off Skodsborg and a supper party afterwards at which, under the influence of the company, the gaiety rose to a wild pitch and eventually passed all bounds. We made speeches, sang, shouted our witticisms at each other all at once, seized each other round the waist and danced, till we had to stop for sheer tiredness. Then we all drank pledges of eternal friendship, and trooped into the town together, and hammered at the doors of the coffee-houses after midnight to try to get in somewhere where we could have coffee. We had learnt all at once to know and appreciate each other to the full; we were united by a feeling of brotherhood and remained friends for life. The life allotted to several of the little band was, it is true, but short; Jens Paludan-Mueller fell at Sankelmark three and a half years later; Nutzhorn had only five years and a half to live. Of the others, Emil Petersen and Julius Lange are dead. But, whether our lives were long or short, our meetings frequent or rare, we continued to be cordially attached to one another, and no misunderstanding or ill-feeling ever cropped up between us.

XI.

Among my Danish excursions was one to Slesvig in July, 1860. The Copenhagen students had been asked to attend a festival to be held at Angel at the end of July for the strengthening of the sparse Danish element in that German-minded region. There were not many who wished to go, but several of those who did had beautiful voices, and sang feelingly the national songs with which it was hoped the hearts of the Angel people, and especially of the ladies, might be touched. Several gentlemen still living, at that time among the recognised leaders of the students, went with us.

We sailed from Korsoer to Flensborg one exquisite Summer night; we gave up the berths we had secured and stayed all night on deck with a bowl of punch. It was a starlight night, the ship cut rapidly through the calm waters, beautiful songs were sung and high-flown speeches made. One speech was held in a whisper, the one in honour of General de Meza, who was still a universal favourite, and who was sitting in his stateroom, waked up out of his sleep, with his white gloves and gaufred lace cuffs on and a red and white night-cap on his head. We young ones only thought of him as the man who, during the battle of Fredericia, had never moved a muscle of his face, and when it was over had said quietly: "The result is very satisfactory."

Unfriendly and sneering looks from the windows at Flensborg very soon showed the travellers that Danish students' caps were not a welcome sight there. The Angel peasants, however, were very pleasant. The festival, which lasted all day and concluded with dancing and fireworks, was a great success, and a young man who had been carousing all night, travelling all day, and had danced all the evening with pretty girls till his senses were in a whirl, could not help regarding the scene of the festival in a romantic light, as he stood there alone, late at night, surrounded by flaring torches, the fireworks sputtering and glittering about him. Some few of the students sat in the fields round flaming rings of pitch, an old Angel peasant keeping the fires alight and singing Danish songs. Absolutely enraptured, and with tears in his eyes, he went about shaking hands with the young men and thanking them for coming. It was peculiarly solemn and beautiful.

Next day, when I got out at Egebaek station on my way from Flensborg, intending to go to Idsted, it seemed that three other young men had had the same idea, so we all four walked together. They were young men of a type I had not met with before. The way they felt and spoke was new to me. They all talked in a very affectionate manner, betrayed at once that they worshipped one another, and seemed to have strong, open natures, much resembling each other. They were Ernst Trier, Noerregaard, and Baagoee, later the three well-known High School men.

The little band arrived at a quick pace on Idsted's beautiful heath, all tufts of ling, the red blossoms of which looked lovely in the light of the setting sun. We sat ourselves down on the hill where Baudissin and his staff had stood. Then Baagoee read aloud Hammerich's description of the battle of Idsted, while each of us in his mind's eye saw the seething masses of troops advance and fall upon one another, as they had done just ten years before.

Our time was short, if we wanted to get under a roof that night. At 9 o'clock we were still eight miles from Slesvig. We did the first four at a pace that was novel to me. Three-parts of the way we covered in forty- five minutes, the last two miles took us twenty. When we arrived at the hotel, there stood Madam Esselbach, of war renown, in the doorway, with her hands on her hips, as in her portrait; she summed up the arrivals with shrewd, sharp eyes, and exclaimed: "Das ist ja das junge Daenemark." Inside, officers were sitting, playing cards. Major Sommer promised us young men to show us Gottorp at 6 o'clock next morning; we should then get a view of the whole of the town from Hersterberg beforehand.

The Major, who was attacked in the newspapers after the war, and whose expression "my maiden sword," was made great fun of, showed us younger ones the magnificent church, and afterwards the castle, which, as a barracks, was quite spoilt. He acted as the father of the regiment, and, like Poul Moeller's artist, encouraged the efficient, and said hard words to the slighty, praising or blaming unceasingly, chatted Danish to the soldiers, Low German to the cook, High German to the little housekeeper at the castle, and called the attention of his guests to the perfect order and cleanliness of the stables. He complained bitterly that a certain senior lieutenant he pointed out to us, who in 1848 had flung his cockade in the gutter and gone over to the Germans, had been reinstated in the regiment, and placed over the heads of brave second- lieutenants who had won their crosses in the war.

Here I parted with my Grundtvigian friends. When I spoke of them to Julius Lange on my return, he remarked: "They are a good sort, who wear their hearts in their buttonholes as decorations."

The society I fell in with for the rest of my journey was very droll. This consisted of Borup, later Mayor of Finance, and a journalist named Falkman (really Petersen), even at that time on the staff of The Dally Paper. I little guessed then that my somewhat vulgar travelling companion would develop into the Cato who wished Ibsen's Ghosts "might be thrust into the slime-pit, where such things belong," and would write articles by the hundred against me. Neither had I any suspicion, during my acquaintance with Topsoee, that the latter would one day be one of my most determined persecutors. Without exactly being strikingly youthful, the large, broad-shouldered Borup was still a young man. Falkman wrote good-humouredly long reports to Bille about Slesvig, which I corrected for him. Borup and Falkman generally exclaimed the moment I opened my mouth: "Not seraphic, now!"

We travelled together to Gluecksborg, saw the camp there, and, as we had had nothing since our morning coffee at 5 o'clock, ate between the three of us a piece of roast meat six pounds weight. We spent the night at Flensborg and drove next day to Graasten along a lovely road with wooded banks on either side. It was pouring with rain, and we sat in dead silence, trying to roll ourselves up in horse-cloths. When in an hour's time the rain stopped, and we put up at an inn, our enforced silence gave place to the wildest merriment. We three young fellows—the future Finance Minister as well—danced into the parlour, hopped about like wild men, spilt milk over ourselves, the sofa, and the waitress; then sprang, waltzing and laughing, out through the door again and up into the carriage, after having heaped the girl with small copper coins.

From Graasten we proceeded to Soenderborg. The older men lay down and slept after the meal. I went up to Dybboelmoelle. On the way back, I found on a hill looking out over Als a bench from which there was a beautiful view across to Slesvig. I lay down on the seat and gazed up at the sky and across the perfect country. The light fields, with their tall, dark hedges, which give the Slesvig scenery its peculiar stamp, from this high-lying position looked absolutely lovely.

XII.

I was not given to looking at life in a rosy light. My nature, one uninterrupted endeavour, was too tense for that. Although I occasionally felt the spontaneous enjoyments of breathing the fresh air, seeing the sun shine, and listening to the whistling of the wind, and always delighted in the fact that I was in the heyday of my youth, there was yet a considerable element of melancholy in my temperament, and I was so loth to abandon myself to any illusion that when I looked into my own heart and summed up my own life it seemed to me that I had never been happy for a day. I did not know what it was to be happy for a whole day at a time, scarcely for an hour. I had only known a moment's rapture in the companionship of my comrades at a merry-making, in intercourse with a friend, under the influence of the beauties of Nature, or the charm of women, or in delight at gaining intellectual riches—during the reading of a poem, the sight of a play, or when absorbed in a work of art.

Any feeling that I was enriching my mind from those surrounding me was unfortunately rare with me. Almost always, when talking to strangers, I felt the exact opposite, which annoyed me exceedingly, namely, that I was being intellectually sucked, squeezed like a lemon, and whereas I was never bored when alone, in the society of other people I suffered overwhelmingly from boredom. In fact, I was so bored by the visits heaped upon me by my comrades and acquaintances, who inconsiderately wasted my time, in order to kill a few hours, that I was almost driven to despair; I was too young obstinately to refuse to see them.

By degrees, the thought of the boredom that I suffered at almost all social functions dominated my mind to such an extent that I wrote a little fairy tale about boredom, by no means bad (but unfortunately lost), round an idea which I saw several years later treated in another way in Sibbern's well-known book of the year 2135. This fairy tale was read aloud to Nutzhorn's band and met with its approval.

But although I could thus by no means be called of a happy disposition, I was, by reason of my overflowing youth, in a constant state of elation, which, as soon as the company of others brought me out of my usual balance, acted like exuberant mirth and made me burst out laughing.

I was noted, among my comrades, and not always to my advantage, for my absolutely ungovernable risibility. I had an exceedingly keen eye for the ridiculous, and easily influenced as I still was, I could not content myself with a smile. Not infrequently, when walking about the town, I used to laugh the whole length of a street. There were times when I was quite incapable of controlling my laughter; I laughed like a child, and it was incomprehensible to me that people could go so soberly and solemnly about. If a person stared straight at me, it made me laugh. If a girl flirted a little with me, I laughed in her face. One day I went out and saw two drunken labourers, in a cab, each with a wreath on his knee; I was obliged to laugh; I met an old dandy whom I knew, with two coats on, one of which hung down below the other; I had to laugh at that, too. Sometimes, walking or standing, absorbed in thoughts, I was outwardly abstracted, and answered mechanically, or spoke in a manner unsuited to my words; if I noticed this myself, I could not refrain from laughing aloud at my own absent-mindedness. It occasionally happened that at an evening party, where I had been introduced by the son of the house to a stiff family to whom I was a stranger, and where the conversation at table was being carried on in laboured monosyllables, I would begin to laugh so unrestrainedly that every one stared at me in anger or amazement. And it occasionally happened that when some sad event, concerning people present, was being discussed, the recollection of something comical I had seen or heard the same day would crop up in my mind to the exclusion of all else, and I would be overtaken by fits of laughter that were both incomprehensible and wounding to those round me, but which it was impossible to me to repress. At funeral ceremonies, I was in such dread of bursting out laughing that my attention would involuntarily fix itself on everything it ought to avoid. This habit of mine was particularly trying when my laughter had a ruffling effect on others in a thing that I myself was anxious to carry through. Thus I spoilt the first rehearsals of Sophocles' Greek play Philoctetes, which a little group of students were preparing to act at the request of Julius Lange. Some of them pronounced the Greek in an unusual manner, others had forgotten their parts or acted badly—and that was quite enough to set me off in a fit of laughter which I had difficulty in stopping. Thus I often laughed, when I was tormented at being compelled to laugh, in reality feeling melancholy, and mentally worried; I used to think of Oechlenschlaeger's Oervarodd, who does not laugh when he is happy, but breaks into a guffaw when he is deeply affected.

These fits of laughter were in reality the outcome of sheer youthfulness; with all my musings and reflection, I was still in many ways a child; I laughed as boys and girls laugh, without being able to stop, and especially when they ought not. But this painful trait in myself directed my thoughts to the nature proper of laughter; I tried to sum up to myself why I laughed, and why people in general laughed, pondered, as well as I was capable of doing the question of what the comical consisted of, and then recorded the fruits of my reflections in my second long treatise, On Laughter, which has been lost.

As I approached my twentieth year, these fits of laughter stopped. "I have," wrote I at the time, "seen into that Realm of Sighs, on the threshold of which I—like Parmeniscus after consulting the Oracle of Trophonius—have suddenly forgotten how to laugh."

XIII.

Meanwhile I had completed my eighteenth year and had to make my choice of a profession. But what was I fitted for? My parents, and those other of my relations whose opinions I valued, wished me to take up the law; they thought that I might make a good barrister; but I myself held back, and during my first year of study did not attend a single law lecture. In July, 1860, after I had passed my philosophical examination (with Distinction in every subject), the question became urgent. Whether I was likely to exhibit any considerable talent as a writer, it was impossible for me to determine. There was only one thing that I felt clear about, and that was that I should never be contented with a subordinate position in the literary world; better a hundred times be a judge in a provincial town. I felt an inward conviction that I should make my way as a writer. It seemed to me that a deathlike stillness reigned for the time being over European literature, but that there were mighty forces working in the silence. I believed that a revival was imminent. In August, 1860, I wrote in my private papers: "We Danes, with our national culture and our knowledge of the literatures of other countries, will stand well equipped when the literary horn of the Gods resounds again through the world, calling fiery youth to battle. I am firmly convinced that that time will come and that I shall be, if not the one who evokes it in the North, at any rate one who will contribute greatly towards it."

One of the first books I had read as a student was Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit, and this career had extraordinarily impressed me. In my childlike enthusiasm I determined to read all the books that Goethe says that he read as a boy, and thus commenced and finished Winckelmann's collected works, Lessing's Laocoon and other books of artistic and archaeological research; in other words, studied the history and philosophy of Art in the first instance under aspects which, from the point of view of subsequent research, were altogether antiquated, though in themselves, and in their day, valuable enough.

Goethe's life fascinated me for a time to such an extent that I found duplicates of the characters in the book everywhere. An old language master, to whom I went early in the morning, in order to acquire from him the knowledge of English which had not been taught me at school, reminded me vividly, for instance, of the old dancing master in Goethe, and my impression was borne out when I discovered that he, too, had two pretty daughters. A more important point was that the book awoke in me a restless thirst for knowledge, at the same time that I conceived a mental picture of Goethe's monumental personality and began to be influenced by the universality of his genius.

Meanwhile, circumstances at home forced me, without further vacillation, to take up some special branch of study. The prospects literature presented were too remote. For Physics I had no talent; the logical bent of my abilities seemed to point in the direction of the Law; so Jurisprudentia was selected and my studies commenced.

The University lectures, as given by Professors Aagesen and Gram, were appalling; they consisted of a slow, sleepy dictation. A death-like dreariness brooded always over the lecture halls. Aagesen was especially unendurable; there was no trace of anything human or living about his dictation. Gram had a kind, well-intentioned personality, but had barely reached his desk than it seemed as though he, too, were saying: "I am a human being, everything human is alien to me."

We consequently had to pursue our studies with the help of a coach, and the one whom I, together with Kappers, Ludvig David and a few others, had chosen, Otto Algreen-Ussing, was both a capable and a pleasant guide. Five years were yet to elapse before this man and his even more gifted brother, Frederik, on the formation of the Loyal and Conservative Society of August, were persecuted and ridiculed as reactionaries, by the editors of the ascendant Press, who, only a few years later, proved themselves to be ten times more reactionary themselves. Otto was positively enthusiastic over Law; he used to declare that a barrister "was the finest thing a man could be."

However, he did not succeed in infecting me with his enthusiasm. I took pains, but there was little in the subject that aroused my interest. Christian the Fifth's Danish Law attracted me exclusively on account of its language and the perspicuity and pithiness of the expressions occasionally made use of.

With this exception what impressed me most of all that I heard in the lessons was Anders Sandoee Oersted's Interpretation of the Law. When I had read and re-read a passage of law which seemed to me to be easily intelligible, and only capable of being understood in one way, how could I do other than marvel and be seized with admiration, when the coach read out Oersted's Interpretation, proving that the Law was miserably couched, and could be expounded in three or four different ways, all contradicting one another! But this Oersted very often did prove in an irrefutable manner.

In my lack of receptivity for legal details, and my want of interest in Positive Law, I flung myself with all the greater fervour into the study of what in olden times was called Natural Law, and plunged again and again into the study of Legal Philosophy.

XIV.

About the same time as my legal studies were thus beginning, I planned out a study of Philosophy and Aesthetics on a large scale as well. My day was systematically filled up from early morning till late at night, and there was time for everything, for ancient and modern languages, for law lessons with the coach, for the lectures in philosophy which Professors H. Broechner and R. Nielsen were holding for more advanced students, and for independent reading of a literary, scientific and historic description.

One of the masters who had taught me at school, a very erudite philologian, now Dr. Oscar Siesbye, offered me gratuitous instruction, and with his help several of the tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, various things of Plato's, and comedies by Plautus and Terence were carefully studied.

Frederik Nutzhorn read the Edda and the Niebelungenlied with me in the originals; with Jens Paludan-Mueller I went through the New Testament in Greek, and with Julius Lange, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Pindar, Horace and Ovid, and a little of Aristotle and Theocritus. Catullus, Martial and Caesar I read for myself.

But I did not find any positive inspiration in my studies until I approached my nineteenth year. In philosophy I had hitherto mastered only a few books by Soeren Kierkegaard. But now I began a conscientious study of Heiberg's philosophical writings and honestly endeavoured to make myself familiar with his speculative logic. As Heiberg's Prose Writings came out, in the 1861 edition, they were studied with extreme care. Heiberg's death in 1860 was a great grief to me; as a thinker I had loved and revered him. The clearness of form and the internal obscurity of his adaptation of Hegel's Teachings, gave one a certain artistic satisfaction, at the same time that it provoked an effort really to understand.

But in the nature of things, Heiberg's philosophical life-work could not to a student be other than an admission into Hegel's train of thought, and an introduction to the master's own works. I was not aware that by 1860 Europe had long passed his works by in favour of more modern thinking. With a passionate desire to reach a comprehension of the truth, I grappled with the System, began with the Encyclopaedia, read the three volumes of Aesthetics, The Philosophy of Law, the Philosophy of History, the Phenomenology of the Mind, then the Philosophy of Law again, and finally the Logic, the Natural Philosophy and the Philosophy of the Mind in a veritable intoxication of comprehension and delight. One day, when a young girl towards whom I felt attracted had asked me to go and say good-bye to her before her departure, I forgot the time, her journey, and my promise to her, over my Hegel. As I walked up and down my room I chanced to pull my watch out of my pocket, and realised that I had missed my appointment and that the girl must have started long ago.

Hegel's Philosophy of Law had a charm for me as a legal student, partly on account of the superiority with which the substantial quality of Hegel's mind is there presented, and partly on account of the challenge in the attitude of the book to accepted opinions and expressions, "morality" here being almost the only thing Hegel objects to.

But it was the book on Aesthetics that charmed me most of all. It was easy to understand, and yet weighty, superabundantly rich.

Again and again while reading Hegel's works I felt carried away with delight at the new world of thought opening out before me. And when anything that for a long time had been incomprehensible to me, at last after tenacious reflection became clear, I felt what I myself called "an unspeakable bliss." Hegel's system of thought, anticipatory of experience, his German style, overburdened with arbitrarily constructed technical words from the year 1810, which one might think would daunt a young student of another country and another age, only meant to me difficulties which it was a pleasure to overcome. Sometimes it was not Hegelianism itself that seemed the main thing. The main thing was that I was learning to know a world-embracing mind; I was being initiated into an attempt to comprehend the universe which was half wisdom and half poetry; I was obtaining an insight into a method which, if scientifically unsatisfying, and on that ground already abandoned by investigators, was fruitful and based upon a clever, ingenuous, highly intellectual conception of the essence of truth; I felt myself put to school to a great intellectual leader, and in this school I learnt to think.

I might, it is true, have received my initiation in a school built up on more modern foundations; it is true that I should have saved much time, been spared many detours, and have reached my goal more directly had I been introduced to an empirical philosophy, or if Fate had placed me in a school in which historical sources were examined more critically, but not less intelligently, and in which respect for individuality was greater. But such as the school was, I derived from it all the benefit it could afford to my ego, and I perceived with delight that my intellectual progress was being much accelerated. Consequently it did not specially take from my feeling of having attained a measure of scientific insight, when I learnt—what I had not known at first—that my teachers, Hans Broechner, as well as Rasmus Nielsen, were agreed not to remain satisfied with the conclusions of the German philosopher, had "got beyond Hegel." At the altitude to which the study of philosophy had now lifted me, I saw that the questions with which I had approached Science were incorrectly formulated, and they fell away of themselves, even without being answered. Words that had filled men's minds for thousands of years, God, Infinity, Thought, Nature and Mind, Freedom and Purpose, all these words acquired another and a deeper meaning, were stamped with a new character, acquired a new value, and the depurated ideas which they now expressed opposed each other, and combined with each other, until the universe was seen pierced by a plexus of thoughts, and resting calmly within it.

Viewed from these heights, the petty and the every-day matters which occupied the human herd seemed so contemptible. Of what account, for instance, was the wrangling in the Senate and the Parliament of a little country like Denmark compared with Hegel's vision of the mighty march, inevitable and determined by spiritual laws, of the idea of Freedom, through the world's History! And of what account was the daily gossip of the newspapers, compared with the possibility now thrown open of a life of eternal ideals, lived in and for them!

XV.

I had an even deeper perception of my initiation when I went back from Hegel to Spinoza and, filled with awe and enthusiasm, read the Ethica for the first time. Here I stood at the source of modern pantheistic Philosophy. Here Philosophy was even more distinctly Religion, since it took Religion's place. Though the method applied was very artificial, purely mathematical, at least Philosophy had here the attraction of a more original type of mind, the effect being much the same as that produced by primitive painting, compared with a more developed stage. His very expression, God or Nature, had a fascinating mysticism about it. The chapter in the book which is devoted to the Natural History of passions, surprised and enriched one by its simple, but profound, explanation of the conditions of the human soul. And although his fight against Superstition's views of life is conducted with a keenness that scouts discussion, whereas in modern Philosophy the contention is merely implied, it seemed as though his thoughts travelled along less stormy paths.

In Hegel, it had been exclusively the comprehensiveness of the thoughts and the mode of the thought's procedure that held my attention. With Spinoza it was different. It was his personality that attracted, the great man in him, one of the greatest that History has known. With him a new type had made its entrance into the world's History; he was the calm thinker, looking down from above on this earthly life, reminding one, by the purity and strength of his character, of Jesus, but a contrast to Jesus, inasmuch as he was a worshipper of Nature and Necessity, and a Pantheist. His teaching was the basis of the faith of the new age. He was a Saint and a Heathen, seditious and pious, at the same time.

XVI.

Still, while I was in this way making a purely mental endeavour to penetrate into as many intellectual domains as I could, and to become master of one subject after another, I was very far from being at peace with regard to my intellectual acquisitions, or from feeling myself in incontestable possession of them. While I was satisfying my desire for insight or knowledge and, by glimpses, felt my supremest happiness in the delight of comprehension, an ever more violent struggle was going on in my emotions.

As my being grew and developed within me and I slowly emerged from the double state of which I had been conscious, in other words, the more I became one and individual and strove to be honest and true, the less I felt myself to be a mere individual, the more I realised that I was bound up with humanity, one link in the chain, one organ belonging to the Universe. The philosophical Pantheism I was absorbed by, itself worked counter to the idea of individualism inherent in me, taught me and presented to me the union of all beings in Nature the All-Divine. But it was not from Pantheism that the crisis of my spiritual life proceeded; it was from the fountains of emotion which now shot up and filled my soul with their steady flow. A love for humanity came over me, and watered and fertilised the fields of my inner world which had been lying fallow, and this love of humanity vented itself in a vast compassion.

This gradually absorbed me till I could hardly bear the thought of the suffering, the poor, the oppressed, the victims of Injustice. I always saw them in my mind's eye, and it seemed to be my duty to work for them, and to be disgraceful of me to enjoy the good things of life while so many were being starved and tortured. Often as I walked along the streets at night I brooded over these ideas till I knew nothing of what was passing around me, but only felt how all the forces of my brain drew me towards those who suffered.

There were warm-hearted and benevolent men among my near relatives. The man whom my mother's younger sister had married had his heart in the right place, so much indeed that he no sooner saw or heard of distress than his hand was in his pocket, although he had little from which to give. My father's brother was a genuinely philanthropic man, who founded one beneficent institution or society after the other, had an unusual power of inducing his well-to-do fellow-townsmen to carry his schemes through, and in the elaboration of them showed a perception and practical sense that almost amounted to genius; this was the more surprising since his intelligence was not otherwise remarkable for its keenness and his reasoning methods were confused. But what I felt was quite different. My feelings were not so easily roused as those of the first-mentioned; I was not so good-natured or so quick to act as he. Neither did they resemble those of my other uncle, who merely represented compassion for those unfortunately situated, but was without the least vestige of rebellious feeling against the conditions or the people responsible for the misery; my uncle was always content with life as it was, saw the hand of a loving Providence everywhere and was fully and firmly convinced that he himself was led and helped by this same Providence, which specially watched over the launching of his projects for the welfare of mankind. No, my feeling was of quite another kind. Nothing was farther removed from me than this sometimes quite childish optimism. It was not enough for me to advertise the sufferings of a few individuals and, when possible, alleviate them; I sought the causes of them in brutality and injustice. Neither could I recognise the finger of a Universal Ruler in a confusion of coincidences, conversations, newspaper articles, and advice by prudent men, the outcome of all which was the founding of a society for seamstresses or the erection of a hospital to counteract the misery that the Controlling Power had Itself occasioned. I was a child no longer, and in that sense never had been childish. But my heart bled none the less with sympathy for society's unfortunates. I did not as yet perceive the necessity of that selfishness which is self-assertion, and I felt oppressed and tormented by all that I, in my comparatively advantageous position as a non- proletarian, enjoyed, while many others did not.

Then another mood, with other promptings, asserted itself. I felt an impulse to step forward as a preacher to the world around me, to the thoughtless and the hardhearted. Under the influence of strong emotion I wrote an edifying discourse, The Profitable Fear. I began to regard it as my duty, so soon as I was fitted for it, to go out into the town and preach at every street-corner, regardless of whether a lay preacher, like myself, should encounter indifference or harvest scorn.

This course attracted me because it presented itself to me under the guise of the most difficult thing, and, with the perversity of youth, I thought difficulty the only criterion of duty. I only needed to hit upon something that seemed to me to be the right thing and then say to myself: "You dare not do it!" for all the youthful strength and daring that was in me, all my deeper feelings of honour and of pride, all my love of grappling with the apparently insurmountable to unite, and in face of this You dare not, satisfy myself that I did dare.

As provisionally, self-abnegation, humility, and asceticism seemed to me to be the most difficult things, for a time my whole spiritual life was concentrated into an endeavour to attain them. Just at this time—I was nineteen—my family was in a rather difficult pecuniary position, and I, quite a poor student, was cast upon my own resources. I had consequently not much of this world's goods to renounce. From a comfortable residence in Crown Prince's Street, my parents had moved to a more modest flat in the exceedingly unaristocratic Salmon Street, where I had an attic of limited dimensions with outlook over roofs by day and a view of the stars by night. Quiet the nights were not, inasmuch as the neighbouring houses re-echoed with screams and shrieks from poor women, whom their late-returning husbands or lovers thrashed in their cups. But never had I felt myself so raised, so exhilarated, so blissfully happy, as in that room. My days slipped by in ecstasy; I felt myself consecrated a combatant in the service of the Highest. I used to test my body, in order to get it wholly under my control, ate as little as possible, slept as little as possible, lay many a night outside my bed on the bare floor, gradually to make myself as hardy as I required to be. I tried to crush the youthful sensuality that was awakening in me, and by degrees acquired complete mastery over myself, so that I could be what I wished to be, a strong and willing instrument in the fight for the victory of Truth. And I plunged afresh into study with a passion and a delight that prevented my perceiving any lack, but month after month carried me along, increasing in knowledge and in mental power, growing from day to day.

XVII.

This frame of mind, however, was crossed by another. The religious transformation in my mind could not remain clear and unmuddied, placed as I was in a society furrowed through and through by different religious currents, issued as I was from the European races that for thousands of years had been ploughed by religious ideas. All the atavism, all the spectral repetition of the thoughts and ideas of the past that can lie dormant in the mind of the individual, leaped to the reinforcement of the harrowing religious impressions which came to me from without.

It was not the attitude of my friends that impressed me. All my more intimate friends were orthodox Christians, but the attempts which various ones, amongst them Julius Lange, and Jens Paludan-Mueller, had made to convert me had glanced off from my much more advanced thought without making any impression. I was made of much harder metal than they, and their attempts to alter my way of thinking did not penetrate beyond my hide. To set my mind in vibration, there was needed a brain that I felt superior to my own; and I did not find it in them. I found it in the philosophical and religious writings of Soeren Kierkegaard, in such works, for instance, as Sickness unto Death.

The struggle within me began, faintly, as I approached my nineteenth year. My point of departure was this: one thing seemed to me requisite, to live in and for The Idea, as the expression for the highest at that time was. All that rose up inimical to The Idea or Ideal merited to be lashed with scorn or felled with indignation. And one day I penned this outburst: "Heine wept over Don Quixote. Yes, he was right. I could weep tears of blood when I think of the book." But the first thing needed was to acquire a clear conception of what must be understood by the Ideal. Heiberg had regarded the uneducated as those devoid of ideals. But I was quite sure myself that education afforded no criterion. And I could find no other criterion of devotion to the Ideal than a willingness to make sacrifices. If, I said, I prove myself less self-sacrificing than any one of the wretches I am fighting, I shall myself incur well-merited scorn. But if self-sacrifice were the criterion, then Jesus, according to the teachings of tradition, was the Ideal, for who as self-sacrificing as He?

This was an inclined plane leading to the Christian spiritual life, and a year later, when I was nearly twenty, I had proceeded so far on this plane that I felt myself in all essentials in agreement with the Christian mode of feeling, inasmuch as my life was ascetic, and my searching, striving, incessantly working mind, not only found repose, but rapture, in prayer, and was elated and fired at the idea of being protected and helped by "God."

But just as I was about to complete my twentieth year, the storm broke out over again, and during the whole of the ensuing six months raged with unintermittent violence. Was I, at this stage of my development, a Christian or not? And if not, was it my duty to become a Christian?

The first thought that arose was this: It is a great effort, a constant effort, sometimes a minutely recurring effort, to attain moral mastery over one's self, and though this certainly need not bring with it a feeling of self-satisfaction, much less ought to do so, it does bring with it a recognition of the value of this self-mastery. How strange, then, that Christianity, which commands its attainment, at the same time declares it to be a matter of indifference to the revealed God whether a man has lived morally or not, since Faith or lack of Faith is the one condition upon which so-called Salvation depends!

The next thought was this: It is only in the writings of Kierkegaard, in his teachings concerning paradox, that Christianity appears so definite that it cannot be confused with any other spiritual trend whatever. But when one has to make one's choice between Pantheism and Christianity, then the question arises, Are Kierkegaard's teachings really historic Christianity, and not rather a rational adaptation? And this question must be answered in the negative, since it is possible to assimilate it without touching upon the question of the revelation of the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove, to the Voice from the clouds, and the whole string of miracles and dogmas.

The next thought again was this: Pantheism does not place any one unconditional goal in front of man. The unbeliever passes his life interested in the many aims that man, as man, has. The Pantheist will therefore have difficulty in living a perfect ethical life. There are many cases in which, by deviating from the strictly ethic code, you do not harm anyone, you only injure your own soul. The Non-Believer will in this case only hardly, for the sake of impersonal Truth, make up his mind to the step which the God-fearing man will take actuated by his passionate fear of offending God.

Thus was I tossed backwards and forwards in my reflections.

XVIII.

What I dreaded most was that if I reached a recognition of the truth, a lack of courage would prevent me decisively making it my own. Courage was needed, as much to undertake the burdens entailed by being a Christian as to undertake those entailed by being a Pantheist. When thinking of Christianity, I drew a sharp distinction between the cowardice that shrunk from renunciation and the doubt that placed under discussion the very question as to whether renunciation were duty. And it was clear to me that, on the road which led to Christianity, doubt must be overcome before cowardice—not the contrary, as Kierkegaard maintains in his For Self-Examination, where he says that none of the martyrs doubted.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both. I concluded therefrom that I had no consciousness of sin, and found this idea confirmed when I looked into my own heart. For however violently at this period I reproached myself and condemned my failings, they were always in my eyes weaknesses that ought to be combatted, or defects that could be remedied, never sins that necessitated forgiveness, and for the obtaining of this forgiveness, a Saviour. That God had died for me as my Saviour,—I could not understand what it meant; it was an idea that conveyed nothing to me.

And I wondered whether the inhabitants of another planet would be able to understand how on the Earth that which was contrary to all reason was considered the highest truth.

XIX.

With Pantheism likewise I was on my guard against its being lack of courage, rather than a conviction of its untruth, which held me back from embracing it. I thought it a true postulate that everything seemed permeated and sustained by a Reason that had not human aims in front of it and did not work by human means, a Divine Reason. Nature could only be understood from its highest forms; the Ideal, which revealed itself to the world of men at their highest development, was present, in possibility and intent, in the first germ, in the mist of primeval creation, before it divided itself into organic and inorganic elements. The whole of Nature was in its essence Divine, and I felt myself at heart a worshipper of Nature.

But this same Nature was indifferent to the weal or woe of humans. It obeyed its own laws regardless of whether men were lost thereby; it seemed cruel in its callousness; it took care that the species should be preserved, but the individual was nothing to it.

Now, like all other European children, I had been brought up in the theory of personal immortality, a theory which, amongst other things, is one way of expressing the immense importance, the eternal importance, which is attributed to each individual. The stronger the feeling of his own ego that the individual has, the more eagerly he necessarily clings to the belief that he cannot be annihilated. But to none could the belief be more precious than to a youth who felt his life pulsate within, as if he had twenty lives in himself and twenty more to live. It was impossible to me to realise that I could die, and one evening, about a year later, I astonished my master, Professor Broechner, by confessing as much. "Indeed," said Broechner, "are you speaking seriously? You cannot realise that you will have to die one day? How young! You are very different from me, who always have death before my eyes."

But although my vitality was so strong that I could not imagine my own death, I knew well enough that my terrestrial life, like all other men's, would come to an end. But I felt all the more strongly that it was impossible everything could be at an end then; death could not be a termination; it could only, as the religions preached and as eighteenth- century Deism taught, be a moment of transition to a new and fuller existence. In reward and punishment after death I could not believe; those were mediaeval conceptions that I had long outgrown. But the dream of immortality I could not let go. And I endeavoured to hold it fast by virtue of the doctrine of the impossibility of anything disappearing. The quantity of matter always remained the same; energy survived every transformation.

Still, I realised that this could not satisfy one, as far as the form which we term individuality was concerned. What satisfaction was it to Alexander that his dust should stop a bung-hole? or to Shakespeare that Romeo and Juliet were acted in Chicago? So I took refuge in parallels and images. Who could tell whether the soul, which on earth had been blind to the nature of the other life, did not, in death, undergo the operation which opened its eyes? Who could tell whether death were not, as Sibbern had suggested, to be compared with a birth? Just as the unborn life in its mother's womb would, if it were conscious, believe that the revolution of birth meant annihilation, whereas it was for the first time awakening to a new and infinitely richer life, so it was perhaps for the soul in the dreaded moment of death....

But when I placed before my master these comparisons and the hopes I built upon them, they were swept away as meaningless; he pointed out simply that nothing went to prove a continuation of personality after death, while on the contrary everything argued against it,—and to this I could not refuse my assent.

Then I understood that in what I called Pantheism, the immortality of the individual had no place. And a slow, internal struggle commenced for renunciation of the importance and value of the individual. I had many a conversation on this point with my teacher, a man tired of life and thoroughly resigned.

He always maintained that the desire of the individual for a continuation of personality was nothing but the outcome of vanity. He would very often put the question in a comical light. He related the following anecdote: In summer evenings he used to go for a walk along the Philosopher's Avenue (now West Rampart Street). Here he had frequently met, sitting on their benches, four or five old gentlemen who took their evening ramble at the same time; by degrees they made each other's acquaintance and got into conversation with one another. It turned out that the old gentlemen were candle-makers who had retired from business and now had considerable difficulty in passing their time away. In reality they were always bored, and they yawned incessantly. These men had one theme only, to which they always recurred with enthusiasm—their hope in personal immortality for all eternity. And it amused Broechner that they, who in this life did not know how to kill so much as one Sunday evening, should be so passionately anxious to have a whole eternity to fill up. His pupil then caught a glimpse himself of the grotesqueness of wishing to endure for millions of centuries, which time even then was nothing in comparison with eternity.

XX.

But in spite of it all, it was a hard saying, that in the pantheistic view of life the absorption of the individual into the great whole took the place of the continued personal existence which was desired by the ego. But what frightened me even more was that the divine All was not to be moved or diverted by prayer. But pray I had to. From my earliest childhood I had been accustomed, in anxiety or necessity, to turn my thoughts towards a Higher Power, first forming my needs and wishes into words, and then later, without words, concentrating myself in worship. It was a need inherited from many hundreds of generations of forefathers, this need of invoking help and comfort. Nomads of the plains, Bedouins of the desert, ironclad warriors, pious priests, roving sailors, travelling merchants, the citizen of the town and the peasant in the country, all had prayed for centuries, and from the very dawn of time; the women, the hundreds and hundreds of women from whom I was descended, had centred all their being in prayer. It was terrible, never to be able to pray again.... Never to be able to fold one's hands, never to raise one's eyes above, but to live, shut in overhead, alone in the universe!

If there were no eye in Heaven that watched over the individual, no ear that understood his plaint, no hand that protected him in danger, then he was placed, as it were, on a desolate steppe where the wolves were howling.

And in alarm I tried once more the path towards religious quietude that I had recently deemed impracticable,—until the fight within me calmed again, and in renunciation I forced my emotion to bow to what my reason had acknowledged as the Truth.



ADOLESCENCE

Julius Lange—A New Master—Inadaption to the Law—The University Prize Competition—An Interview with the Judges—Meeting of Scandinavian Students—The Paludan-Muellers—Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson—Magdalene Thoresen—The Gold Medal—The Death of King Frederik VII—The Political Situation—My Master of Arts Examination—War—Admissus cum laude praecipua—Academical Attention—Lecturing—Music—Nature—A Walking Tour—In Print—Philosophical Life in Denmark—Death of Ludwig David— Stockholm.

I.

Among my many good comrades, there was one, Julius Lange, with whom comradeship had developed into friendship, and this friendship again assumed a passionate character. We were the two, who, of them all, were most exactly suited to one another, completed one another. Fundamentally different though we were, we could always teach each other something. We grew indispensable to one another; for years there seldom a day went by that we did not meet. The association with his junior cannot possibly have given Julius Lange a delight corresponding to that which his society gave me. Intellectually equal, we were of temperaments diametrically opposed. Having the same love of Art and the same enthusiasm for Art,—save that the one cared more for its pictorial and the other for its literary expression,—we were of mutual assistance to one another in the interchange of thoughts and information. Entirely at variance in our attitude towards religious tradition, in our frequent collisions we were both perpetually being challenged to a critical inspection of our intellectual furniture. But I was the one who did the worshipping.

When Julius Lange, on December 17, 1861, after having twice been to see me and found me out, the third time met with me and informed me: "I have received an invitation to go to Italy on Saturday and be away five months," was, though surprised, exceedingly glad for my friend's sake, but at the same time I felt as if I had received a blow in the face. What would become of me, not only during the interval, but afterwards? Who could say whether Lange would ever come back, or whether he would not come back changed? How should I be able to endure my life! I should have to work tremendously hard, to be able to bear the loss of him. I could hardly understand how I should be able to exist when I could no longer, evening after evening, slip up to my friend's little room to sit there in calm, quiet contentment, seeing pictures and exchanging thoughts! It was as though a nerve had been cut. I only then realised that I had never loved any man so much. I had had four eyes; now I had only two again; I had had two brains; now I had only one; in my heart I had felt the happiness of two human beings; now only the melancholy of one was left behind.

There was not a painting, a drawing, a statue or a bas-relief in the galleries and museums of Copenhagen that we had not studied together and compared our impressions of. We had been to Thorwaldsen's Museum together, we went together to Bissen's studio, where in November, 1861, I met for the first time my subsequent friends, Vilhelm Bissen and Walter Runeberg. The memory of Julius Lange was associated in my mind with every picture of Hobbema, Dubbels or Ruysdael, Rembrandt or Rubens, every reproduction of Italian Renaissance art, every photograph of church or castle. And I myself loved pictures even more ardently than poetry. I was fond of comparing my relations with literature to affection for a being of the same sex; my passion for pictures to the stormy passion of a youth for a woman. It is true that I knew much less about Art than about Poetry, but that made no difference. I worshipped my favourite artists with a more impetuous enthusiasm than any of my favourite authors. And this affection for pictures and statuary was a link between my friend and myself. When we were sitting in my room together, and another visitor happened to be there, I positively suffered over the sacrifice of an hour's enjoyment and when Lange got up to go, I felt as though a window had been slammed to, and the fresh air shut out.

II.

I had for a long time pursued my non-juridic studies as well as I could without the assistance of a teacher. But I had felt the want of one. And when a newly appointed docent at the University, Professor H. Broechner, offered instruction in the study of Philosophy to any who cared to present themselves at his house at certain hours, I had felt strongly tempted to take advantage of his offer. I hesitated for some time, for I was unwilling to give up the least portion of my precious freedom; I enjoyed my retirement, the mystery of my modest life of study, but on the other hand I could not grapple with Plato and Aristotle without the hints of a competent guide as to the why and wherefore.

I was greatly excited. I had heard Professor Broechner speak on Psychology, but his diction was handled with such painful care, was so monotonous and sounded so strange, that it could not fail to alarm. It was only the professor's distinguished and handsome face that attracted me, and in particular his large, sorrowful eyes, with their beautiful expression, in which one read a life of deep research—and tears. Now, I determined to venture up to Broechner. But I had not the courage to mention it to my mother beforehand, for fear speaking of it should frighten me from my resolution, so uneasy did I feel about the step I was taking. When the day which I had fixed upon for the attempt arrived —it was the 2nd of September, 1861,—I walked up and down in front of the house several times before I could make up my mind to go upstairs; I tried to calculate beforehand what the professor would say, and what it would be best for me to reply, interminably.

The tall, handsome man with the appearance of a Spanish knight, opened the door himself and received the young fellow who was soon to become his most intimate pupil, very kindly. To my amazement, as soon as he heard my name, he knew which school I had come from and also that I had recently become a student. He vigorously dissuaded me from going through a course of Plato and Aristotle, saying it would be too great a strain— said, or implied, that I should be spared the difficult path he had himself traversed, and sketched out a plan of study of more modern Philosophy and Aesthetics. His manner inspired confidence and left behind it the main impression that he wished to save the beginner all useless exertion. All the same, with my youthful energy, I felt, as I went home, a shade disappointed that I was not to begin the History of Philosophy from the beginning.

My visit was soon repeated, and a most affectionate intimacy quickly sprang up between master and pupil, revealed on the side of the elder, in an attitude of fatherly goodwill to which the younger had hitherto been a stranger, the teacher, while instructing his pupil and giving him practical guidance, constantly keeping in view all that could further his well-being and assist his future; my attitude was one of reverence and affection, and of profound gratitude for the care of which I was the object.

I certainly, sometimes, in face of my master's great thoroughness and his skill in wrestling with the most difficult thoughts, felt a painful distrust of my own capacity and of my own intellectual powers, compared with his. I was also not infrequently vexed by a discordant note, as it were, being struck in our intercourse, when Broechner, despite the doubts and objections I brought forward, always took it for granted that I shared his pantheistic opinions, without perceiving that I was still tossed about by doubts, and fumbling after a firm foothold. But the confidential terms upon which I was with the maturer man had an attraction for me which my intimacy with undecided and youthfully prejudiced comrades necessarily lacked; he had the experience of a lifetime behind him, he looked down from superior heights on the sympathies and antipathies of a young man.

To me, for instance, Ploug's The Fatherland was at that time Denmark's most intellectual organ, whereas Bille's Daily Paper disgusted me, more particularly on account of the superficiality and the tone of finality which distinguished its literary criticisms. Broechner, who, with not unmixed benevolence, and without making any special distinction between the two, looked down on both these papers of the educated mediocrity, saw in his young pupil's bitterness against the trivial but useful little daily, only an indication of the quality of his mind. Broechner's mere manner, as he remarked one day with a smile, "You do not read The Daily Paper on principle," made me perceive in a flash the comicality of my indignation over such articles as it contained. My horizon was still sufficiently circumscribed for me to suppose that the state of affairs in Copenhagen was, in and of itself, of importance. I myself regarded my horizon as wide. One day, when making a mental valuation of myself, I wrote, with the naivete of nineteen, "My good qualities, those which will constitute my personality, if I ever become of any account, are a mighty and ardent enthusiasm, a thorough authority in the service of Truth, a wide horizon and philosophically trained thinking powers. These must make up for my lack of humour and facility."

It was only several years after the beginning of our acquaintance that I felt myself in essential agreement with Hans Broechner. I had been enraptured by a study of Ludwig Feuerbach's books, for Feuerbach was the first thinker in whose writings I found the origin of the idea of God in the human mind satisfactorily explained. In Feuerbach, too, I found a presentment of ideas without circumlocution and without the usual heavy formulas of German philosophy, a conquering clarity, which had a very salutary effect on my own way of thinking and gave me a feeling of security. If for many years I had been feeling myself more conservative than my friend and master, there now came a time when in many ways I felt myself to be more liberal than he, with his mysterious life in the eternal realm of mind of which he felt himself to be a link.

III.

I had not been studying Jurisprudence much more than a year before it began to weigh very heavily upon me. The mere sight of the long rows of Schou's Ordinances, which filled the whole of the back of my writing-table, were a daily source of vexation. I often felt that I should not be happy until the Ordinances were swept from my table. And the lectures were always so dreary that they positively made me think of suicide—and I so thirsty of life!—as a final means of escape from the torment of them. I felt myself so little adapted to the Law that I wasted my time with Hamlet-like cogitations as to how I could give up the study without provoking my parents' displeasure, and without stripping myself of all prospects for the future. And for quite a year these broodings grew, till they became a perfect nightmare to me.

I had taken a great deal of work upon myself; I gave lessons every day, that I might have a little money coming in, took lessons myself in several subjects, and not infrequently plunged into philosophical works of the past, that were too difficult for me, such as the principal works of Kant. Consequently when I was nineteen, I begun to feel my strength going. I felt unwell, grew nervous, had a feeling that I could not draw a deep breath, and when I was twenty my physical condition was a violent protest against overwork. One day, while reading Kant's Kritik der Urteilskraft, I felt so weak that I was obliged to go to the doctor. The latter recommended physical exercises and cold shower-baths.

The baths did me good, and I grew so accustomed to them that I went on taking them and have done so ever since. I did my gymnastic exercises with a Swede named Nycander, who had opened an establishment for Swedish gymnastics in Copenhagen.

There I met, amongst others, the well-known Icelandic poet and diplomatist, Grimur Thomsen, who bore the title of Counsellor of Legation. His compatriots were very proud of him. Icelandic students declared that Grimur possessed twelve dress shirts, three pairs of patent leather boots, and had embraced a marchioness in Paris. At gymnastics, Grimur Thomsen showed himself audacious and not seldom coarse in what he said and hinted. It is true that by reason of my youth I was very susceptible and took offence at things that an older man would have heard without annoyance.

IV.

I continued to be physically far from strong. Mentally, I worked indefatigably. The means of deciding the study question that, after long reflection, seemed to me most expedient, was this: I would compete for one of the University prizes, either the aesthetic or the philosophical, and then, if I won the gold medal, my parents and others would see that if I broke with the Law it was not from idleness, but because I really had talents in another direction.

As early as 1860 I had cast longing eyes at the prize questions that had been set, and which hung up in the Entrance Hall of the University. But none of them were suited to me. In 1861 I made up my mind to attempt a reply, even if the questions in themselves should not be attractive.

There was amongst them one on the proper correlation between poetic fiction and history in the historical romances. The theme in itself did not particularly fascinate me; but I was not ignorant of the subject, and it was one that allowed of being looked at in a wide connection, i.e., the claims of the subject as opposed to the imagination of the artist, in general. I was of opinion that just as in sculpture the human figure should not be represented with wings, but the conception of its species be observed, so the essential nature of a past age should be unassailed in historic fiction. Throughout numerous carefully elaborated abstractions, extending over 120 folio pages, and in which I aimed at scientific perspicuity, I endeavoured to give a soundly supported theory of the limits of inventive freedom in Historical Romance. The substructure was so painstaking that it absorbed more than half of the treatise. Quite apart from the other defects of this tyro handiwork, it lauded and extolled an aesthetic direction opposed to that of both the men who were to adjudicate upon it. Hegel was mentioned in it as "The supreme exponent of Aesthetics, a man whose imposing greatness it is good to bow before." I likewise held with his emancipated pupil, Fr. Th. Vischer, and vindicated him. Of Danish thinkers, J.L. Heiberg and S. Kierkegaard were almost the only ones discussed.

Heiberg was certainly incessantly criticised, but was treated with profound reverence and as a man whose slightest utterance was of importance. Sibbern's artistic and philosophical researches, on the other hand, were quite overlooked, indeed sometimes Vischer was praised as being the first originator of psychological developments, which Sibbern had suggested many years before him. I had, for that matter, made a very far from sufficient study of Sibbern's researches, which were, partly, not systematic enough for me, and partly had repelled me by the peculiar language in which they were couched.

Neither was it likely that this worship of Heiberg, which undeniably peeped out through all the proofs of imperfections and self- contradictions in him, would appeal to Hauch.

When I add that the work was youthfully doctrinaire, in language not fresh, and that in its skeleton-like thinness it positively tottered under the weight of its definitions, it is no wonder that it did not win the prize. The verdict passed upon it was to the effect that the treatise was thorough in its way, and that it would have been awarded the prize had the question asked been that of determining the correlation between History and Fiction in general, but that under the circumstances it dwelt too cursorily on Romance and was only deemed deserving of "a very honourable mention."

Favourable as this result was, it was nevertheless a blow to me, who had made my plans for the following years dependent on whether I won the prize or not. Julius Lange, who knocked at my door one evening to tell me the result, was the witness of my disappointment. "I can understand," he said, "that you should exclaim: 'Oleum et operam perdidi!', but you must not give up hope for so little. It is a good thing that you prohibited the opening of the paper giving your name in the event of the paper not winning the prize, for no one will trouble their heads about the flattering criticism and an honourable mention would only harm you in People's eyes; it would stamp you with the mark of mediocrity."

V.

The anonymous recipient of the honourable mention nevertheless determined to call upon his judges, make their acquaintance, and let them know who he was.

I went first to Hauch, who resided at that time at Frederiksberg Castle, in light and lofty rooms. Hauch appeared exaggeratedly obliging, the old man of seventy and over paying me, young man as I was, one compliment after the other. The treatise was "extraordinarily good," they had been very sorry not to give me the prize; but I was not to bear them any ill- will for that; they had acted as their consciences dictated. In eighteen months I should be ready to take my Magister examination; the old poet thought he might venture to prophesy that I should do well. He was surprised at his visitor's youth, could hardly understand how at my age I could have read and thought so much, and gave me advice as to the continuation of my studies.

Sibbern was as cordial as Hauch had been polite and cautious. It was very funny that, whereas Hauch remarked that he himself had wished to give me the prize with an although in the criticism, but that Sibbern had been against it, Sibbern declared exactly the reverse; in spite of all its faults he had wanted to award the medal, but Hauch had expressed himself adverse. Apparently they had misunderstood one another; but in any case the result was just, so there was nothing to complain of.

Sibbern went into the details of the treatise, and was stricter than Hauch. He regretted that the main section of the argument was deficient; the premises were too prolix. He advised a more historic, less philosophical study of Literature and Art. He was pleased to hear of the intimate terms I was on with Broechner, whereas Hauch would have preferred my being associated with Rasmus Nielsen, whom he jestingly designated "a regular brown-bread nature." When the treatise was given back to me, I found it full of apt and instructive marginal notes from Sibbern's hand.

Little as I had gained by my unsuccessful attempt to win this prize, and unequivocally as my conversation with the practical Sibbern had proved to me that a post as master in my mother tongue at a Grammar-school was all that the Magister degree in Aesthetics was likely to bring me, whereas from my childhood I had made up my mind that I would never be a master in a school, this conversation nevertheless ripened my determination to give up my law studies, but of course only when by successfully competing for the prize the next year I had satisfactorily proved my still questionable ability.

VI.

The Meeting of Scandinavian students at Copenhagen in June, 1862, taught me what it meant to be a Scandinavian. Like all the other undergraduates, I was Scandinavian at heart, and the arrangements of the Meeting were well calculated to stir the emotions of youth. Although, an insignificant Danish student, I did not take part in the expedition to North Zealand specially arranged for our guests, consequently neither was present at the luncheon given by Frederik VII to the students at Fredensborg (which was interrupted by a heavy shower), I was nevertheless deeply impressed by the Meeting.

It was a fine sight to behold the students from the three other Scandinavian Universities come sailing across the Sound from Malmoe to Copenhagen. The Norwegians were especially striking, tall and straight, with narrow faces under tasseled caps, like a wood of young fir trees; the national type was so marked that at first I could hardly see any difference between them.

For me, there were three perfect moments during the festivities. The first was at the meeting of all the students in the Square of Our Lady, after the arrival of the visitors, when the scholars of the Metropolitan School, crowding the windows of the building, greeted them with a shout of delight. There was such a freshness, such a childish enthusiasm about it, that some of us had wet eyes. It was as though the still distant future were acclaiming the young ones now advancing to the assault, and promising them sympathy and conquest.

The second was when the four new flags embroidered by Danish ladies for the students were consecrated and handed over. Clausen's speech was full of grandeur, and addressed, not to the recipients, but to the flags as living beings: "Thou wilt cross the Baltic to the sanctuary at Upsala. Thou wilt cross the Cattegat to the land of rocks...." and the address to each of the flags concluded: "Fortune and Honour attend thee!" The evening after the consecration of the flags, there was a special performance at the Royal Theatre for the members of the Meeting, at which Heiberg, radiant as she always was, and saluted with well-merited enthusiasm, played Sophie in the vaudeville "No," with a rosette of the Scandinavian colours at her waist. Then it was that Paludan-Mueller's prologue, recited by our idolised actor, Michael Wiehe, caused me the third thrilling moment. Listening to the words of the poet from a bad place in the gallery, I was hardly the only one who felt strangely stirred, as Wiehe, letting his eyes roam round the theatre, said:

Oh! that the young of the North might one day worthily play Their part! Oh that each one might do his best For the party he has chosen! That never there be lack Of industry, fidelity, strength and talents! And may he firm step forth, the mighty genius (Mayhap, known only to the secret power within him, Seated amongst us now), the mighty genius, Who, as Fate hath willed it, is to play The mighty part and do the mighty things.

Involuntarily we looked round, seeking for the one to whom the poet's summons referred.

The general spirit of this Meeting has been called flat in comparison with that pervading former meetings. It did not strike the younger participants so. A breath of Scandinavianism swept over every heart; one felt borne along on a historic stream. It seemed like a bad dream that the peoples of the North had for so many centuries demolished and laid waste each other, tapped one another for blood and gold, rendered it impossible for the North to assert herself and spread her influence in Europe.

One could feel at the Meeting, though very faintly, that the Swedes and Norwegians took more actual pleasure in each other, and regarded themselves as to a greater extent united than either of them looked upon themselves as united with the Danes, who were outside the political Union. I was perhaps the only Dane present who fancied I detected this, but when I mentioned what I thought I observed to a gifted young Norwegian, so far was he from contradicting me that he merely replied: "Have you noticed that, too?"

Notwithstanding, during the whole of the Meeting, one constantly heard expressed on every hand the conviction that if Germany were shortly to declare war against Denmark—which no one doubted—the Swedes and Norwegians would most decidedly not leave the Danes in the lurch. The promise was given oftener than it was asked. Only, of course, it was childish on the part of those present at the Meeting to regard such promises, given by the leaders of the students, and by the students themselves in festive mood, as binding on the nations and their statesmen.

I did not make any intellectually inspiring acquaintances through the Meeting, although I was host to two Upsala students; neither of them, however, interested me. I got upon a friendly footing through mutual intellectual interests with Carl von Bergen, later so well known as an author, he, like myself, worshipping philosophy and hoping to contribute to intellectual progress. Carl von Bergen was a self-confident, ceremonious Swede, who had read a great many books. At that time he was a new Rationalist, which seemed to promise one point of interest in common; but he was a follower of the Bostroem philosophy, and as such an ardent Theist. At this point we came into collision, my researches and reflections constantly tending to remove me farther from a belief in any God outside the world, so that after the Meeting Carl von Bergen and I exchanged letters on Theism and Pantheism, which assumed the width and thickness of treatises. For very many years the Swedish essayist and I kept up a friendly, though intermittent intercourse. Meanwhile von Bergen, whose good qualities included neither character nor originality, inclined, as years went on, more and more towards Conservatism, and at forty years old he had attained to a worship of what he had detested, and a detestation of what he had worshipped. His vanity simultaneously assumed extraordinary proportions. In a popular Encyclopaedia, which he took over when the letter B was to be dealt with, and, curiously enough, disposed of shortly afterwards, von Bergen was treated no less in detail than Buonaparte. He did battle with some of the best men and women in Sweden, such as Ellen Key and Knut Wicksell, who did not fail to reply to him. When in 1889 his old friend from the Students' Meeting gave some lectures on Goethe in Stockholm, he immediately afterwards directed some poor opposition lectures against him, which neither deserved nor received any reply. It had indeed become a specialty of his to give "opposition lectures." When he died, some few years later, what he had written was promptly forgotten.

There was another young Swedish student whom I caught a glimpse of for the first time at the Students' Meeting, towards whom I felt more and more attracted, and who eventually became my friend. This was the darling of the gods, Carl Snoilsky. At a fete in Rosenborg Park, amongst the songs was one which, with my critical scent, I made a note of. It was by the then quite unknown young Count Snoilsky, and it was far from possessing the rare qualities, both of pith and form, that later distinguished his poetry; but it was a poet's handiwork, a troubadour song to the Danish woman, meltingly sweet, and the writer of it was a youth of aristocratic bearing, regular, handsome features, and smooth brown hair, a regular Adonis. The following year he came again, drawn by strong cords to Christian Winther's home, loving the old poet like a son, as Swinburne loved Victor Hugo, sitting at Mistress Julie Winther's feet in affectionate admiration and semi-adoration, although she was half a century old and treated him as a mother does a favourite child.

It was several years, however, before there was any actual friendship between the Swedish poet and myself. He called upon me one day in my room in Copenhagen, looking exceedingly handsome in a tight-fitting waistcoat of blue quilted silk. In the absence of the Swedo-Norwegian Ambassador, he was Charge d'Affaires in Copenhagen, after, in his capacity as diplomatic attache, having been stationed in various parts of the world and, amongst others, for some time in Paris. He could have no warmer admirer of his first songs than myself, and we very frequently spent our evenings together in Bauer's wine room—talking over everything in Scandinavian, English, or French literature which both of us had enthusiastically and critically read. On many points our verdicts were agreed.

There came a pause in Snoilsky's productive activity; he was depressed. It was generally said, although it sounded improbable, that he had had to promise his wife's relations to give up publishing verse, they regarding it as unfitting the dignity of a noble. In any case, he was at that time suffering under a marriage that meant to him the deprivation of the freedom without which it was impossible to write. Still, he never mentioned these strictly personal matters. But one evening that we were together, Snoilsky was so overcome by the thought of his lack of freedom that tears suddenly began to run down his cheeks. He was almost incapable of controlling himself again, and when we went home together late at night, poured out a stream of melancholy, half-despairing remarks.

A good eighteen months later we met again in Stockholm; Snoilsky was dignified and collected. But when, a few years later, so-called public opinion in Sweden began to rave against the poet for the passion for his second wife which so long made him an exile from his country, I often thought of that evening.

As years passed by, his outward bearing became more and more reserved and a trifle stiff, but he was the same at heart, and no one who had known him in the heyday of his youth could cease to love him.

VII.

A month after the Students' Meeting, at the invitation of my friend Jens Paludan-Mueller, I spent a few weeks at his home at Nykjoebing, in the island of Falster, where his father, Caspar Paludan-Mueller, the historian, was at the time head master of the Grammar-school. Those were rich and beautiful weeks, which I always remembered later with gratitude.

The stern old father with his leonine head and huge eyebrows impressed one by his earnestness and perspicacity, somewhat shut off from the world as he was by hereditary deafness. The dignified mistress of the house likewise belonged to a family that had made its name known in Danish literature. She was a Rosenstand-Goeiske. Jens was a cordial and attentive host, the daughters were all of them women out of the ordinary, and bore the impress of belonging to a family of the highest culture in the country; the eldest was womanly and refined, the second, with her Roman type of beauty and bronze-coloured head, lovely in a manner peculiarly her own; the youngest, as yet, was merely an amiable young girl. The girls would have liked to get away from the monotony of provincial life, and their release came when their father was appointed to a professorship at Copenhagen University. There was an ease of manner and a tone of mental distinction pervading the whole family. Two young, handsome Counts Reventlow were being brought up in the house, still only half-grown boys at that time, but who were destined later to win honourable renown. One of them, the editor of his ancestress's papers, kept up his acquaintance with the guest he had met in the Paludan-Mueller home for over forty years.

There often came to the house a young Dane from Caracas in Venezuela, of unusual, almost feminine beauty, with eyes to haunt one's dreams. He played uncommonly well, was irresistibly gentle and emotional. After a stay of a few years in Denmark he returned to his native place. The previously mentioned Groenbeck, with his pretty sister, and other young people from the town, were frequent guests during the holidays, and the days passed in games, music, wanderings about the garden, and delightful excursions to the woods.

On every side I encountered beauty of some description. I said to Jens one day: "One kind of beauty is the glow which the sun of Youth casts over the figure, and it vanishes as soon as the sun sets. Another is stamped into shape from within; it is Mind's expression, and will remain as long as the mind remains vigorous. But the supremest beauty of all is in the unison of the two harmonies, which are contending for existence. In the bridal night of this supremest beauty, Mind and Nature melt into one."

A few years later the old historian was called upon to publish the little book on Gulland, with its short biography prefixed, as a memorial to his only son, fallen at Sankelmark, and again, a few years later, to edit Frederik Nutzhorn's translation of Apuleius in memory of his son's friend, his elder daughter's fiance. During the preparation of these two little books, our relations became more intimate, and our friendship continued unbroken until in the month of February, 1872, a remark in one of my defensive articles caused him to take up his pen against me. My remark was to the effect that there were men of the same opinions as myself even among the priests of the established church. Caspar Paludan- Mueller declared it my public duty to mention of whom I was thinking at the time, since such a traitor was not to be tolerated in the lap of the Church. As I very naturally did not wish to play the part of informer, I incurred, by my silence, the suspicion of having spoken without foundation. The Danish man whom I had in my thoughts, and who had confided his opinions to me, was still alive at the time. This was the late Dean Ussing, at one time priest at Mariager, a man of an extraordinarily refined and amiable disposition, secretly a convinced adherent of Ernest Renan. A Norwegian priest, who holds the same opinions, is still living.