This site is full of FREE ebooks - Project Gutenberg Australia

Title:      Twelve Stories [1945]
Author:     Steen Steensen Blicher [1782-1848]
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.:  0300871.txt
Edition:    1
Language:   English
Character set encoding:     Latin-1(ISO-8859-1)--8 bit
Date first posted:          June 2003
Date most recently updated: June 2003

Production notes: Words in italics in the book
                  are enclosed by underscores (_) in this eBook

Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks are created from printed editions
which are in the public domain in Australia, unless a copyright notice
is included. We do NOT keep any eBooks in compliance with a particular
paper edition.

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing this
file.

This eBook is made available at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg of Australia License which may be viewed online at
http://gutenberg.net.au/licence.html

To contact Project Gutenberg of Australia go to http://gutenberg.net.au

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Twelve Stories [1945]
Author:     Steen Steensen Blicher [1782-1848]

TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH BY Hanna Astrup Larsen [1873-1945]

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SIGRID UNDSET [1882-1949]

1945
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON
FOR THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION NEW YORK




CONTENTS


STEEN STEENSEN BLICHER, by Sigrid Undset

THE JOURNAL OF A PARISH CLERK

THE ROBBERS' DEN

TARDY AWAKENING

ALAS, HOW CHANGED!

THE PARSON AT VEJLBYE

GYPSY LIFE

THE HOSIER AND HIS DAUGHTER

MARIE

THE GAMEKEEPER AT AUNSBJERG

AN ONLY CHILD

THREE HOLIDAY EVES

BRASS-JENS

NOTES




STEEN STEENSEN BLICHER

BY SIGRID UNDSET


IN an autobiographical sketch, written in his fifty-seventh year, Steen
Blicher ends his record of a life spent in tireless activity and almost
constant misfortune, with the following words:

"Finally, he has made numerous contributions to the public journals--at
first sometimes anonymously--through which he has mainly tried to call
attention to imperfections and abuses, to arouse the spirit of his
people to a more vigorous life, and to further patriotism at the expense
of selfishness. He has had--and still has--to fight misfortunes and
heavy sorrows. Several times he has been in peril of his life from
accidents when driving, from runaway horses, from illness. . . . But
during all his tribulations he has held firmly to his chosen motto:
'Lord, when Thy hand is heavy upon me, Thou makest me strong.'"

No doubt Blicher was in perfectly good faith when he wrote these words,
convinced that he had stated two vitally important facts about himself.
His conscience assured him that, in spite of the scant and tardy
recognition he had met as an author and a poet--and he cannot have been
unaware of the fact that in his vast literary output were some short
stories and poems of rare originality and exquisite beauty--he had never
flagged in his unselfish devotion to his people and in his efforts to
serve the material and spiritual needs of his native land. And even if
it seemed to him as though an unkind fate had persecuted him ever since
he became a man, the poverty-stricken village pastor remained steadfast
in his trust in God. He had grown up among a people whose lives were
bare, harsh, and difficult, and he had accepted the fact that God does
not coddle His children. He treats them as grown-up sons and daughters,
who must be able to face misery and carry the responsibility for what
they bring upon themselves and their fellow men. After all, this life is
short, uncertain--like a mirage; for hope of adjustment and consolation
a man must look beyond the sunken graves where withering grass and dead
flowers rustle in the wind from the moors. In spite of his shortcomings
as a pastor, dire as they were, Blicher was'in his own way a deeply
pious man. And in his own strange way he was also a man of rare
fortitude.




I


Steen Steensen Blicher was born on October 11, 1782, in the parsonage of
Vium in Jutland, where his father, Niels Blicher, was a minister. For
five generations the forefathers of Steen Blicher had been clergymen.
Most of his relatives on his father's side were parsons.

Since the Lutheran Reformation such families, wholly devoted to the
ministry, had become quite common in the Scandinavian countries. A
peasant's son who had managed to work his way through the Latin school
and the University, ending up as the minister of a country parish, would
make every effort to prevent his children from sinking back into the
ranks of the common people. He would strive hard to make it possible for
his sons to study divinity, and try to marry his daughters to curates
and vicars. Usually a minister's income was very modest. And if his
predecessor had left a widow, she had a right to be pensioned from his
tithes, the basic income of the living. It might even happen that there
was more than one minister's widow in the parish. When Steen Blicher was
given the living of Thorning and Lysgaard, no fewer than three widows
claimed their share of his income. Small wonder that the country parsons
were often inordinately eager to make some extra money at the expense of
their parishioners--"Parson's purse is never filled," says an old
proverb--or that they often were denounced for neglecting their duties
as shepherds of souls, while they devoted their energies to the tilling
of the parsonage acres, to literary work, or whatever extraneous
activities they had a natural inclination for.

Yet the Church offered by far the easiest way for a lad who wanted to
escape from the unfree and uncertain conditions to which the peasants,
at least in Denmark and Sweden, were subject. The lack of personal
liberty and security was far worse than the economic stringency, for, in
spite of the latter, farmers sometimes managed to become quite
well-to-do. But under a rural system where all but a handful of the
peasants were tenants under great or small landlords, and bound to work
on the fields of the manor, even if they had to neglect their own
holdings; where the squire had the right to inflict bodily punishment on
his tenants; where the _Stavnsbaand_ institution held the men tied to
their native village as long as they were of an age to serve in the
militia in case of war; and where the lord of the manor could send a
young man away to be made a soldier if he had a grudge against him, the
opportunity to change this life of virtual serfdom for the life of a
clergyman must have seemed immensely tempting. Yet the commoner, even as
a clergyman, did not escape the domination of the nobleman, who to a
great extent possessed the right to give away the living attached to the
church or churches on his domain. Many of these country squires might be
kind and pious men, yet they could not help regarding the clergy as just
an order of upper servants; in fact, it was not unusual that the
minister had for a time served as valet or tutor to sons of the squire,
while he was trying to finance his studies in the Capital. The situation
of the parson between his patron and his parishioners, and subject to
the former, was as between the bark and the wood. And the parishioners
were prone to regard their parson with suspicion and accuse him, justly
or unjustly, of toadying to his lordship and trying to squeeze as much
as possible in emoluments out of his flock.

Nevertheless, the minister had come a long way from the status of his
humbler ancestors. He was addressed as Herr--Herr Sören, Herr Jens (not
until the eighteenth century did it become usual to address him by his
surname). And a young man who had a genuine yearning after knowledge and
was inclined to the pursuit of literature and scholarship would usually
have to approach such goals by way of the Church. The marvel is not that
the spiritual life of the Scandinavian countries lagged in the first
centuries after the Reformation, nor that the moral and intellectual
standard of the clergy on the whole was none too brilliant.  The marvel
is that, in spite of so many obstacles, a number of clergymen were still
able to achieve as much as they did, as scholars, poets, educators of
the people, and as men of erudition.

Niels Blicher lived up to the best traditions of his class, when he
tried to introduce improved methods of agriculture among his
parishioners, and made propaganda for inoculation against smallpox. He
joined the company of those eighteenth-century clergymen who wrote
"topographical descriptions" of the district where they lived and
worked, storing up for generations to come an immense amount of
information about the soil and climate, the health conditions, the
farming methods, the morals and customs and superstitions of the country
people of the times. Niels Blicher's book about his parish of Vium is
delightful. His numerous exercises in Latin verse-making at least amused
himself.

He had married Christine Marie Curz, a minister's daughter, descended
from the famous Bishop Bang of Odense, who in his turn claimed descent
from the illustrious house of Hvide--that great and noble clan which in
the Middle Ages had given to their country a number of heroes of ballads
and history. They had been great warriors, great statesmen, founders of
cities, builders of churches and abbeys, loyal servants of the great
kings of Denmark, until one of them turned regicide and several of them
rebelled against less great kings, and made war on their native land.
Blicher mentions this relationship of his with the Hvide lords, but it
does not seem to have occupied his fantasy unduly. (To poor Herman Bang
a century later the thought of his descent from the house of Hvide
became an obsession.) But Steen Blicher had ever since his childhood had
an intimate knowledge of the rural aristocracy of Denmark, and for him
it did not possess much glamour. Like his contemporaries, Blicher took
for granted that a nobleman ought to be a noble man, and sometimes was.
But he also took for granted that people very often are not what they
ought to be. He was keenly aware of the way a man's outlook on life and
his behavior is conditioned by the virtues and vices of the class he has
been born into, and he quietly enjoyed the rich variety of manners and
tastes and ambitions brought about by different environment. But good or
bad, funny or vicious in an entertaining way, to Blicher the squire and
his lady, the poor and the wealthy peasants, the gypsy and his woman
flitting across the lonely Jutland moors outside the border line of
ordered society, were just human beings, of whom no two are alike but
all deserving of interest and sympathy.

Blicher scarcely ever mentions his mother. No memory of Marie Curz seems
to have entered into the world of his imagination. He was her eldest
son. Two children died in infancy. A fourth, a boy five years younger
than Steen, survived. According to the scanty information that has been
gleaned about Niels Blicher's wife, she was queer and melancholy almost
from the beginning of their married life. Soon after the birth of her
youngest son she became hopelessly insane.

Her uncle was _Etatsraad_ Steen de Steensen, owner of the manor of
Aunsbjerg. The _Etatsraad_ (Counsellor of State, an honorary title not
involving practical duties) was a kindly man; and probably because his
small namesake could not be properly cared for at home with the invalid
mother, Steen was frequently carried off to Aunsbjerg to spend some time
with this distinguished relative and his strong-minded lady. Another
relative of his mother's was Fr. von Schinckel, owner of Hald--of all
Danish country seats the richest in legends and traditions. Beautifully
situated on an inland lake near Viborg, the old capital of Jutland, the
von Schinckel home was surrounded by the ruins of a prehistoric
stronghold, a medieval castle, and an earlier manor. The Schinckels took
their turn in caring for the little boy, who for all practical purposes
was motherless. Indeed, it seems as if the only taste of womanly
tenderness and a woman's caresses Steen Blicher had as a child were the
kisses the wanton young Charlotte Schinckel showered upon him, when she
was in the mood. At Aunsbjerg the boy felt as if he were in a cage, and
Hald was not much better. Yet what he had heard and observed from his
footstool of the doings of the grown-up people about him, stayed in his
memory, and a belated understanding of the things he had seen happen at
Aunsbjerg and at Hald became an important part of his inspiration later
on. A number of his finest tales have for a setting these two old
Jutland country houses.

In those days, however, he always longed to get away from these strict
ladies, to go home to Vium and the parsonage. His mother's condition may
have been something dark and frightening that children often evolve an
elaborate technique to ignore or circumvent. And his father tried to
make up to his two young sons for the shortcomings of their home. He was
their tutor and their friend; he let them accompany him on his visits to
the poor and the sick of the parish, and on his excursions to collect
material for his "Topography of the Shire of Vium."

At that time the parish straddled the border line between the fertile
eastern plains and gentle valleys of the east coast and the vast and
desolate high moor, _Ahlheden,_ which occupied the interior of the
Jutland peninsula all the way from the northern sandy spit of Skagen
down to the marshy lowlands of Slesvig, continuing with some
interruptions into the moors of northwestern Germany.

Since the dawn of Danish history the Jutlanders had enjoyed the
reputation of being the toughest, shrewdest, most stubborn of Danes.
Nowhere else had the peasantry fought so hard and so long for their
ancient Northern freedom against the system of oppression from the
South, which slowly and gradually engulfed the rural populations of
Denmark and Sweden during the later Middle Ages and the time of the
Reformation. Fierce uprisings of the peasants had to be crushed in blood
before the State and the aristocracy could subdue them--and in Jutland
the peasants were never wholly subdued. Nevertheless, the reason why
Jutland even during the centuries of rural unfreedom had the largest
percentage of owner-farmers in Denmark may not have been the
much-vaunted stubbornness of the Jutland mind. On the contrary, cause
and effect probably worked the other way around, as in Norway.  There
the resistance of the peasants against attempts to deprive them of their
old freedoms was helped by the natural conditions of the country, which
did not favor the building up of large estates, since most of the arable
land was in scattered patches separated by rocky and infertile ground;
and the independence thus preserved strengthened the peasants'
individualism and sense of personal dignity. So in the parts of Jutland
where small and isolated farms nestled among wide marshes and on the
outskirts of the barren moorland, the greedy noblemen were not tempted
to build up their estates. Here the farmer-owner survived, while the
fertile eastern counties, where the peasants had always lived in
villages and tilled their land under a system of strip-farming, came
under the domination of the gentry. But even here the Jutlanders never
tamely submitted to their master. If he was too unjust or arbitrary, he
was met with grumbling obstruction or sullen resistance. The rebellious
peasant who retaliated against a beating or an insult to his girl by
killing the squire or his overseer could still escape to the great
forests and the moor--haunts of the numerous robber gangs who made the
highways unsafe. As everywhere, when the common people suffer
oppression, the rebel outlaws became popular heroes, their deeds of
daring and their generosity towards the poor, the stuff ballads and
tales are made of. As a child Steen Blicher must have imbibed a great
deal of this robber lore.

Behind the village with its green pastures and fields was the somber
world of the moor. Wave upon wave of hills, dark with brown heather,
rolled all the way towards the distant horizon, where the rows of great
burial mounds from the Bronze Age topped the ridges--memorials of the
time when the ancient _Haervej,_ the trail of the Danish warriors of
old, traversed the peninsula from north to south. In between the hills,
sluggish creeks and stagnant swamps daubed the murky landscape with
patches of pale green. In the hollows, copses of stunted oak bowed to
the winter storms and managed to keep alive, yielding shelter to the
game birds that abounded on the moor. The roads of the moorland had made
themselves: they were the ruts dug out by the creaking wooden wheels of
oxcarts, or yellow and sandy tracks worn by the hoofs of innumerable
cattle, which the drovers bought from the farmers along the Limfjord and
herded south to fatten in the marshes of Sönderjylland, before they were
marketed in Hamburg or northern Germany. To a sensitive boy with a vivid
imagination they were also the roads leading back through the history of
his country, into the dim past of the race.

Sometimes the wanderer on the moor would suddenly come upon a tiny
homestead with low walls of turf and clay almost disappearing under the
overhanging thatched roof. A slender column of yellow peat smoke curling
upwards under the wide sky, some shy, barefooted children fleeing at the
sight of a stranger, a few sheep seeking their meager food in the
heather, told of a life lived many miles away from the nearest neighbor.
Yet the inside of the cottage might look snug, or even prosperous, with
solid furniture, curtained beds swelling with bolsters and linen sheets,
an array of copper pots and pewter tankards by the fireplace. The
challenge of the infertile moorland had been accepted by an industrious
and thrifty population, which turned to sundry home industries. The only
domestic animals that could be kept in any number were sheep, and so the
spinning of wool and the knitting of woollen garments kept whole
families busy, men as well as women. Scattered among the hills were pits
of a kind of clay that made excellent pottery, and the "Black
Jutlanders," handmade pots and pans and dishes, were carted all over
Denmark and shipped from Jutland ports to neighboring countries, even as
far as to the Netherlands. Usually middlemen skimmed the cream off the
business, but even so the makers might achieve a modest competence and
by the thrift of several generations amass a small fortune.

The love of the moor was planted in the heart of Steen Blicher when as a
child his father took him along on his trips--and it was also his father
who initiated him in the noble art of the hunter. It seems that Niels
Blicher let his boys have a gun as soon as they were big enough to tote
one; and his friends in the manors of the neighborhood, who appreciated
the parson as a member of their hunting parties, let the lads run along
with the men. The spell of the wild and desolate dark land, which would
turn into a riot of purple and rose colors for a few weeks in blossom
time; the everlasting trill of the skylarks under the immense vault; the
hot summer days when the distant grave-mounds seemed to float above
ground and dance in the hot, trembling air; the teeming life of wild
things, birds and hares and foxes, in winter time even now and again a
stray wolf; the tales about outlaws and gypsies; the friendliness of the
moorland people, hospitable as the Arabs of the desert--these were the
treasures Steen Blicher laid up in his boyhood. Later the moor was
destined to become his inspiration, his happy hunting ground, his refuge
from misery and heartbreak.




II


According to Blicher, he was a frail child and dull at school. Finally,
though, he must have made some progress with his studies, for when he
was admitted to the Latin School in Randers at the age of fourteen, he
was placed in the third form, among boys most of whom were his seniors.
He may have had private tutors at home, but evidently Niels Blicher had
himself been the chief instructor of his sons.

Just before he left his home for school, something happened to the
adolescent that probably influenced his whole life for the worse. His
father had recently been promoted to the living of Randlev, and here
young Steen made the acquaintance of a girl of sixteen, newly married to
a doctor, but staying for a few summer weeks as a guest with relatives.
The girl took it into her head to flirt outrageously with the
thirteen-year-old lad--hugging, petting, kissing him lavishly in public
as well as when they were alone. Avowedly, the young grass widow merely
indulged in an innocent pastime; technically, the parson's boy was still
a child. Moreover, according to the tastes of the time, "page-love" was
so sweet, the admired pattern being the love of Cherubino for the
Countess in Mozart's opera. To the boy the caresses of the plump and
pretty little brunette were a dangerous intoxication--a stormy awakening
of his emotions and his senses (though Blicher goes out of his way to
deny that his passion for the doctor's wife had much to do with
sensuality). When the lady left Randlev to return to her husband, Steen
waved a last adieu to his beloved from the stone fence of the vicarage
garden. Afterwards he grovelled in the grass, wishing that his heart
would really break, and that he might die.

Friends of Ernestine Blicher, the sixteen-year-old widow Steen Blicher
married fifteen years later, describe her almost in the same words as he
has used about his first love--small and plump and pretty, with an
abundance of nut-brown curls. So it is very likely that the romping of a
flighty married girl with the schoolboy Blicher had a good deal to do
with his marriage to a woman who helped to make his life a tragedy.

The Latin School at Randers was a good one, according to the standards
of the day. The headmaster and some of the other masters were gifted
teachers who knew how to make the strong meat of classical learning
palatable to young boys and foster in them a genuine zest for
intellectual activity. Steen Blicher was not quite seventeen years old
when he left school for Copenhagen, where, according to the pattern of
studies of the time, the final examination and the graduation from
school to University took place. Steen acquitted himself very honorably
and settled down to the study of theology--certainly not because he felt
any special vocation for the ministry, but because he had always been
destined for it.

He witnessed the attack of the British Fleet under Nelson and Parker on
the navy of the "Twin Kingdoms," Norway and Denmark, April 2, 1801.
Blicher enlisted in the Students' Volunteer Defense Corps, but this time
he was not called upon to prove his valor. The naval engagement had
ended in a stalemate, with heavy losses on both sides. The Danish and
Norwegian seadogs fought back with fierce courage and considerable
skill. But Nelson called for a parley and pretended that, unless an
armistice was entered upon, he would have to burn the captured Danish
ships with the men in them. The Crown-Prince-Regent Frederik was a very
brave man, but he was also very tender-hearted. The undecided battle of
Copenhagen was turned into a diplomatic defeat. Denmark and Norway had
to quit the League of the Armed Neutrals and submit to letting England
search their merchant ships for contraband. Moreover, Denmark's ally
Russia at the same time signed a peace treaty with England. For six
years Denmark stayed outside the Napoleonic wars, enjoying a period of
unusual prosperity.

Ever since he had taken over the rule for his insane father, Crown
Prince Frederik and his Cabinet had worked untiringly to liberate the
Danish peasantry and improve their condition. The right of the squire to
inflict bodily punishment on his tenants was abolished; tenants could
not be evicted from their farms without having the case tried in a court
of justice, and the eviction must be made by rural policemen, not by the
squire's people. Most important of these amendments was the abolition of
the _Stavnsbaand,_ which took the recruiting out of the hands of the
landowners. In place of it, conscription based on a census of all adult
males was introduced; and in the mind of the Danes a national
conscripted army and personal freedom for all men became twin ideas.
Credit institutions were established expressly to help the farmers to
buy their homesteads on easy terms. The transition of the peasants from
tenants to freeholders made new strides in these years of prosperity.
Several estates were bought by so-called "manor butchers," to be
parcelled out and sold on speculation. But the driving force in this
work of emancipation had been the Crown Prince and his helpers, most of
them noblemen from the highest Danish aristocracy. It was only natural
that the common men of Denmark should look upon their autocratic monarch
with a love and a loyalty which none of his later disastrous mistakes
could weaken, and also that the Danes on the whole should regard their
noblemen as the cream of the nation, in spite of the black sheep and the
dullards and the crackpots in their ranks. They really had seen a number
of their great lords stand out as men of true moral greatness.
Revolutions might be all right in other countries, but in this
enlightened corner of the world similar reforms were brought about
peacefully, and now, with enlightenment about to penetrate the whole
nation, there was no telling how far small Denmark might go as an
example to the world of a model country.

This smugness and conservatism of the Danes in the beginning of the
nineteenth century and their excessive royalism were to have fatal
consequences in the long run, but in the days of Blicher's youth these
were scarcely apparent. In his tale "A Fortnight in Jutland" his, or
rather his father's, memories of the Jacobin Club of Viborg have become
a source of rich fun, and the fact that the Baron of the tale is an
out-and-out rascal does nothing to mitigate Blicher's scorn of the
provincial revolutionaries.

Blicher was not called upon to fight for his country in the summer of
1801, but the nervous tension of the time may have had something to do
with the breakdown in health he now suffered. A sunstroke together with
a chest trouble prostrated the sensitive youth, and the doctors held out
no hope of recovery from what they called his "incurable hectic
condition." It seems to have been a case of advanced consumption. But
Blicher's Jutland stubbornness was roused by this death sentence. He did
not care to linger on as an invalid; he would try to cure himself by
drastic treatment, or else succumb quickly.

Though he was so weak that he could scarcely cross the room without
becoming exhausted, he went for a walk every day, and little by little
he was able to extend his promenades. To strengthen his ailing lungs he
started playing the flute. And when his health had improved somewhat he
took a situation as tutor to young Lauridz Foss, whose wealthy bourgeois
father had bought a manor on the island of Falster. In an age when ideas
about infection and contagious diseases were of the haziest kind, nobody
objected to the consumptive Mr. Blicher's acting as tutor to a lad only
a few years his junior. The situation offered ample opportunities of
outdoor life for mentor as well as pupil. The two young men went
duck-hunting in ditches and marshes, sometimes soaking wet for days on
end; tramped across the country with guns and dogs; shot seabirds and
seals from a rowboat; or during the winter, when the fjord was icebound
and bitter winds cut through their clothing, went hunting on skates
among the outer islets. As by a miracle, this indifference to the state
of his health turned the wan and emaciated candidate for death into a
lean, tanned, sturdy young man--at least that is what Steen Blicher
tells us. Moreover, he insists that, except for a few attacks of acute
illness, he ever after enjoyed a gloriously robust health, which none of
his adversities could shake.

In the time left over from their outdoor activities, Blicher and his
pupil managed to get along with their studies well enough for Lauridz
Foss to pass the examinations at the University of Copenhagen in due
time and graduate with distinction. And the friendship between Steen
Blicher and Lauridz Foss lasted all their lives. Meetings, sometimes
made happier still by hunting trips, and the exchange of letters and
greetings kept green the attachment between the two men, and after the
death of Steen Blicher his former pupil wrote some very touching
reminiscences of the good man and great genius he had loved so
faithfully.

During his stay in Falster Blicher made one more acquaintance that
became a lifelong love with him. He discovered the poems of Ossian.
Macpherson's book was still widely held to be a genuine translation of
ancient Gaelic lays. To young Blicher from Jutland, the highland moors
of Scotland, where heroes and bards of old moved to their tragic fates
in an everlasting mist, and lovely maidens mourned their dead lovers to
the strains of the harp, merged with the moors at home. Family
traditions and old wives' tales he had heard as a boy were glorified in
the sorrows of the blind Ossian and the faithful Malvina.

Probably Blicher already toyed with the idea of translating Ossian into
Danish during his stay in Falster, though he did not start work on it
until later. His translations of Ossian appeared, one volume in 1807, a
second in 1809. Opinion about Macpherson's rank as a poet has changed
since the time when Ossian was the craze of the literary world all over
Europe. I still think he was no mean poet, and my lingering love for
Macpherson's misty world of gloom and doom dates back to a summer in my
maternal grandfather's old-fashioned Danish garden, where as a
schoolgirl I read Blicher's rendering in the green shadow of the elder
arbor.--To Blicher "the Bard of Morven" remained a kind of tutelary
spirit as long as he lived. In the dark years that lay ahead he was to
find consolation in communing with the heroes and heroines of Ossian's
world, flitting about him on his own moors. His second daughter, his
favorite child, he had named Malvina after the widowed bride of the dead
Oscar.

But the young man who returned from his stay in Falster in 1803 to
resume his studies for the ministry in Copenhagen had no misgivings
about the future. He was, according to his own words, quite a "mahogany
fellow," which in the slang of the time meant a dandy. He was musical
and played several instruments with more or less skill, he had a nice
singing voice, he danced, was sociable and keenly interested in poetry
and public matters. And there would always be an opportunity to get out
of town and go hunting when he felt like it.

Yet he does not seem to have been a member of any of the literary clubs
or coteries that flourished among the Copenhagen students and young
writers. The stir caused by the introduction of the Romantic movement
from Germany evidently left him cold. In spite of the British outrage
against Denmark, Blicher loved English poetry and literature, though not
uncritically. Byron he disliked. But he liked the English. Their
politicians might be ruthless and unhampered by moral niceties, but he
loved their language, and he liked the humaneness of the English people.
Germany was another story. As a Jutlander he knew his and his ancestors'
neighbor, whose political intrigues and policy of infiltration in the
southern part of Jutland were backed by a mean and greedy people.

He was terribly poor, but he was used to straitened circumstances from
his home. And when after a while he was given a scholarship that
included lodgings in one of the colleges for indigent students, of which
Copenhagen had several, he immediately offered to share his quarters
with a friend who was as poor as himself. In justice to Blicher it
should not be forgotten that, if later he degenerated into an inveterate
borrower, hopelessly unreliable in money matters, he was always willing
to share what he had, if he had anything at all, with whoever happened
to come along.

Meanwhile it became evident that Denmark could not possibly be kept out
of the European wars much longer. The sympathy of the people was with
England, but the plight of Germany under the heel of Napoleon made the
Danes forget their old grudge against the nation which innumerable times
had played the aggressor against Denmark. "We want to keep what is ours,
but we want all other people to do the same." A Danish army of defense
was stationed at the southern frontier to fight off a possible French
invasion. But among the measures proposed at the meeting in Tilsit
between Napoleon and the Emperor of Russia was an "invitation" to
Denmark to lend her navy for an attack on Great Britain. Reckless, and
not too well informed on European matters, the British Government of
Canning decided to forestall this eventuality, and in the late summer of
1807 a large British fleet appeared in Danish waters. Denmark was
offered "protection" and colonies after the war as payment for the
"loan" of her navy to the English. The Crown Prince refused: "With what
would you pay for the honor of Denmark?" Then the British landed their
invasion army and shelled Copenhagen until approximately one third of
the city was razed and burnt to the ground--among buildings that
suffered were the cathedral and the University. After a defense of four
days, the city capitulated. The British carried away the large and
modern navy together with much war material, and six hundred vessels of
the merchant marine. Denmark was in the war on the side of Napoleon
until his defeat, and had to pay the price.

Steen Blicher had fought with the defenders of the city. When he
returned to seek his lodgings after the capitulation, they were gone,
and so were all his earthly possessions, including his first
manuscripts. For a while he had to go home to his father in Jutland.
Napoleon had sent an army, mainly of Spanish auxiliaries, into Jutland,
as he had planned a joint French and Danish attack on Sweden. The attack
never came off, but Blicher made the acquaintance of a number of French
and Spanish soldiers and officers, and liked them. He acquired a
fondness for their languages--according to himself strong enough to make
him learn both French and Spanish quite well.

He returned to Copenhagen, and in 1809 he was able to finish his studies
and graduate "with distinction." Then he applied, not for a living in
the Church, but to be appointed teacher at his old school in Randers.

The teachers of the "learned schools" were appointed by royal decree.
And as the King, Frederik VI, who had succeeded his insane father in
1808, was the very type of paternalistic monarch who manages to keep an
eye on an incredible number of his State employees, it is likely that
the way Blicher acquitted himself of his duties as a teacher was
remembered and held against him for years in the offices of the
government in Copenhagen.

Soon after his arrival in Randers the new "Adjunct," as was Blicher's
title, married the widow of his uncle, Pastor Peder Daniel Blicher of
Spentrup. The bride, Ernestine, was not quite seventeen years old and
the mother of a baby boy. Her father was a petty government official who
had been imprisoned for embezzlement, and after the breaking-up of her
Copenhagen home the girl Ernestine came to Pastor Blicher as a nursemaid
for his children by his second wife. She was considered very
good-looking, small and plump, with an abundance of dark curls. She was
also said to be very flighty. She had been a widow only for a couple of
months when she became engaged to a young agriculturist, but when he was
killed in an accident she was reported to have exclaimed, "How
lucky--for I have just become engaged to the overseer of Hald!" Then she
married Steen Blicher.

He was evidently in love with his "sweet Neste"--his pet name for his
wife. She may have reminded him of his first love. But it certainly
would not make her less attractive that her late husband had left her a
tidy sum of money. Blicher immediately invested part of it in a house.

It was a bad thing that the house was situated so far from the school
that Adjunct Blicher habitually came late for his classes. But it was
worse that he very soon began to neglect his duties as a teacher
shamelessly--cancelling classes, or simply not turning up at the school
for a day or a couple of days, without giving any excuse. All we know is
that Blicher was a welcome guest at the hunting parties of the
neighboring landed gentry and farmers, and that he enjoyed the
duck-shooting in the estuary of the river Gudenaa.

In a little more than a year he had made himself impossible as a member
of the staff of his country's "learned schools." He had also made away
with Ernestine's fortune. His own explanation is that the money was lost
because of the deterioration of the Danish currency during the war
years. That is probably true as far as it goes. But he was always a bad
manager of his finances, and it seems that he had already in Randers
forged the first links in that chain of debts which he dragged along
until his death. The house in Randers was sold, and it is uncertain
whether Blicher succeeded in saving anything at all out of his first
financial shipwreck.




III


His damaging record as a teacher was probably the reason Blicher did not
try to get another position under the government. Instead he returned to
his father in Randlev, to take over as the pastor's tenant the farming
of the land that belonged to the vicarage. Occasionally he aided his
father in his ministerial duties, but it was understood that farming was
to be his real job.

Now Blicher was keenly interested in the problems of agriculture. The
rotation of crops was still a new departure among the Jutland peasants.
Blicher practised the method himself and preached it to his neighbors.
The breeding of sheep was the mainstay of the agriculture of Jutland,
but according to time-honored custom the farmers let their sheep run
loose, herded by small boys or girls who were unable to hinder them from
doing a great deal of harm to the crops. Blicher invented a movable
sheep-pen, a large frame on wheels which prevented the animals from
doing damage and kept the field evenly manured. He also advised the
peasants to cultivate a greater variety of crops and to produce more for
home consumption, as a means to improving the health of the coming
generations. He proposed that the villagers should enlarge their arable
land by co-operative draining of the low-lying marshes, of which the
parish had vast areas. He recommended cultivation of flax on the fertile
lands of the east coast in order that a linen industry could supplement
the woollen industry of the moors.

Blicher's theories were usually sound enough, but he preferred to write
and make propaganda for his ideas instead of toiling steadily in his own
fields and barnyard. As a practising farmer he was never a success. He
was simply incapable of sticking to the tasks it was his business to
mind, when he felt like doing something else.

Having begun to write for the newspapers, he discovered more and more
topics he wanted to write about. He wrote about the Jews, fighting with
might and main whatever was to be found in Denmark of anti-Semitic
prejudice. He proposed the founding of "Magdalen homes," where fallen
girls could be reclaimed and reintegrated into respectable society. The
cause of the Greeks, struggling to throw off the yoke of the Turks,
fired his enthusiasm, and he even composed a proclamation in English
verse, calling upon Britain to make war on Turkey. He wanted his country
to abolish capital punishment, "that the government who first of all
struck off the fetters from our black brethren may also give the world
the first example of a more humane treatment of criminals." (Denmark had
been the first country to abolish Negro slavery in her colonies.)

His journalistic efforts got him involved in a number of newspaper
controversies, some of which went on for months. Now and then he had
written verse, enough to make a slim volume which was published by an
obscure Jutland firm. The collection contains one of his loveliest and
most famous poems, "My native land is the brown land of the heather--."
No anthology of Danish poetry would be complete without it.

Meanwhile Blicher's economy had become a sorry mess. And he had a family
of young children. He had to try and get into the ministry in order to
earn a living. But for some time it seemed as if all his applications
for vacant parishes were in vain. In 1819 he composed an advertisement:
"A graduate in theology wants a situation as gamekeeper or forest ranger
in a gentleman's establishment. Besides his main work he offers in his
spare time to give instruction in the Latin, Greek, German, French,
Italian, .and English languages. Can produce first-class recommendations
as to his skill as a hunter."

It may be questioned if Blicher really had intended to advertise in the
newspapers for a job as gamekeeper. He showed the draft to a hunting
companion of his, a gentleman of some influence, and through his good
offices he was at last appointed vicar of the parishes of Thorning and
Lysgaard. The church of Lysgaard had formerly been served by the parson
of Vium, so here Blicher was to mount his father's old pulpit. He
returned to that part of Jutland which he loved with his whole soul, the
somber moor and the poor, sandy soil he had tramped as a small boy. In
1819 he moved into the vicarage of Thorning with his wife and six small
children, the eldest being his stepson.

He dragged with him a burden of debt. Among other things he owed taxes
for several years. The income of the parishes of Thorning and Lysgaard
was modest, and the buildings of the vicarage were badly in need of
repairs, which the parson had to make mainly at his own expense.
Struggling with his private difficulties, he nevertheless took time to
work for the betterment of the village schools in his twin parishes, for
the improvement of the peasants' methods of farming, and for a number of
causes which he considered beneficial to the common people. And when he
had worked till he was tired, writing and talking about matters of
public welfare, Blicher felt that he had really deserved a long, lonely
stroll, with his dog and his gun, in among the hills, to look for grouse
and woodcock in the heather. His parishioners were not quite satisfied
with the way he fulfilled his duties as minister. Particularly the
people in the village of Lysgaard complained that Mr. Blicher had not
held the number of divine services in their church to which they were
entitled. But when he proposed that they should send horses and carriage
after him, as his own carriage was the worse for wear, the Lysgaard
farmers refused.




IV


In the city of Aarhus lived a printer, a certain Mr. Elmquist, who at
this time decided that, as a sideline to his printing business, he would
cater to the reading public of Jutland with a magazine offering short
stones, popular articles, poems, and so on. This kind of publication,
the precursor of the pulp magazines of today, enjoyed an immense
popularity in Germany. Mr. Elmquist borrowed for his venture the title
of one of the most popular, _Lesefrüchte,_ which means "windfallen
fruit." But Elmquist translated it _Laesefrugter,_ "fruits of reading,"
and intimated his intention of filling its pages with translations which
he could print without paying for them. However, Mr. Elmquist also
approached Pastor Blicher to ask for his collaboration. In order to add
to his meager income, Blicher for six years provided the Aarhus magazine
with "translations" from sundry European languages, that is, he retold
stories he had read, abridging or altering them according to his fancy.
But he also let Elmquist print some of his poems and a number of
original tales, for which he drew mainly upon his memories of the
Jutland of his childhood, on old traditions, and on his intimate
knowledge of his countrymen, from the gentry to the gypsies. Thus were
printed for the first time a number of short stories, some of them
peerless masterpieces of Danish prose-writing. In 1823 Elmquist first
published "The Journal of a Parish Clerk."

To give an American public some idea of how _Steen Steensen Blichers
Noveller_ are beloved by his Danish admirers, one might possibly compare
his position with that of Jane Austen among the British. But the Danish
Blicher-worshippers are a much larger proportion of the nation, for in
Denmark the "highbrows" are to be found among fishermen and farmers as
well as among the elite of Danish artists and scholars. Moreover,
Blicher's tales have a more profound human appeal than those of the
brilliant Englishwoman, while his artistic skill, when he is at his
best, is as consummate as Jane Austen's. You will meet lovers of
Blicher--men and women, who have read and re-read his tales any number
of times to enjoy again the old remembered beauties and discover new
perfections--on trains or in boarding houses, at a family party or by a
café table, when a casual mention of Blicher's name will unite you in a
kind of delightful freemasonry. (I was initiated in the cult when my
Danish mother read to me the first part of "Marie," ending with the
words of the old fisherman's wife when her husband permits the adoption
of the babe saved from the ocean, "In Jesus' name! She is a loan of
God's from the sea." Some years later I was entrusted with the precious
volume and read for myself the sequel, which nearly broke my heart. And
when my first book had been published, my mother gave me "for
remembrance" an edition of Blicher's poems about the bird life of
Jutland, _Traekfuglene,_ with a dedication, "that as a writer you will
always look up to Steen Blicher as your model, for profound integrity,
fearless acceptance of life as it is, and truthfulness in telling what
you know.")

The time of Steen Blicher is known as the Golden Age of Danish
literature. The impact of the Romantic movement in Germany had touched
off an explosion like fireworks of young geniuses in the North. The
liberation of emotion, the faith in intuition, the yearning for unity of
nature and spirit, the rediscovery of the secret places of the mind,
created a new kind of poetry. The battle cry of freedom for the nations,
the pondering on the past of the races and on that mystic entity called
the soul of a nation, fired the enthusiasm of the young writers of
Denmark and Sweden. (Norway had regained her national independence in
1814 under difficult circumstances, and her energies and emotions were
occupied with practical problems, almost to the exclusion of the arts
and literature, until the coming of Henrik Wergeland--and he did not
belong to any movement; he was a movement and a literature in himself.)
But the Romantic movement in Denmark rapidly developed a character of
its own. After all, freedom for the whole people was no new idea in the
Northern nations; it was rather a resurrection of the spirit of the
fathers of old who, in the words of the Swede Thorild, were "no man's
masters, no man's slaves." But this liberation had been well under way
in Denmark a long time before the Romantic movement started. Interest in
the past of the Northern nations had never been dead, and now it became
an inspiration not only to the scholars but also to the poets and
artists, who invested the Northern past with glamourous beauty. To the
Northern people interest in real men and women with the weaknesses and
strength of our common human nature had always been greater than their
enthusiasm for ideal constructions of heroes and heroines. It is this
taste for real life, its glories and its miseries, which makes the
Icelandic sagas so vital that they appeal to us still by their timeless
human quality as something contemporary, while most of the great
literature of the Middle Ages of which they were a part seems to belong
to another world than our own. Instead of dreamy nostalgia for the
faraway, the world beyond the horizon, Oehlenschlaeger and Grundtvig,
and later Hans Christian Andersen and Christian Winther, gave their love
wholeheartedly to the men and women of their own native land, to the
past and the present and the future of their country, the sights and
sounds of Denmark's nature. No hankering for the "Blue Flower" of
Romanticism--the roses and the wild flowers, the oaks and beeches rooted
in the soil of their homeland were all they desired.

A strong undercurrent of realism was present also in the Romantic
literature of Denmark--even when the writers looked for the usual
romantic stuff in a Southern or Oriental background and wrote of
picturesque countries which they did not know much about, but dreamed
all the more vividly. Yet however much the world of their imagination
was rooted in the realities they knew and loved, their aim was to invest
this world with the grandeur of fates larger than everyday life, and
transfigure it with beautiful and noble emotions. Like the painters of
their age, they made their studies in the field, but used their sketches
for carefully composed canvases of balancing lines and rich colors. And
when they wrote of their own land they wrote as lovers and glorified the
things they loved. With a warm and healthy sensualism, as innocent of
the convulsions of passion as of the repressions due to fear or bad
conscience, the Danish poets exulted voluptuously in the loveliness of
Denmark--the silence and the cool dusk of the beechwoods, the blue
Sounds flung like embracing arms of the ocean around the sea-born
country, the waving field of yellow grain bordered with cornflowers and
poppies. And voluptuously sweet were to them the women of Denmark,
fair-haired and white-bosomed, virtuous yet friendly and warm--adorable
sweethearts, loyal wives, strong and tender mothers. The common men of
Denmark were "the merry sons of nature," sturdy, brave, clever, and
honest. Many of the writers of the Golden Age were the sons of country
parsons and had spent their childhood among the peasants, or they came
from the homes of the poor. But they did not feel called upon to tell
about their origin, except to praise the attractive sides, and forecast
the ideals they aimed at and fondly hoped their countrymen would live up
to in the future.

Blicher loved his native Jutland without any desire to idealize either
his home or his own people. The world he knew was full of good and evil
things, of bitterness and bliss and humdrum trivialities, but he
accepted everything--it was his world. He accepted it as a loyal son
accepts his mother, or a faithful husband the wife who has been his
partner through a long life. Jutland belonged to him, and he belonged to
Jutland. Underneath his conscious love of this corner of the earth was a
deep, almost unconscious conviction that he could no more uproot himself
from this soil and this people than he could cease to breathe.

In a nation as highly cultured as the Danish of his time, where the art
of good writing was so widely appreciated and the love of poetry so
intense, a genius like Steen Blicher's was bound to be discovered and
recognized before long, even if he did publish his work in an obscure
provincial magazine. Literary circles in Copenhagen became aware of this
lone bird who liked to call himself "the heath lark," this country
parson who wrote in a way all his own, different from the others, but
sometimes, oh, how splendidly well! "Realism" was a word that had not
yet become fashionable, but the critics of Copenhagen praised Mr.
Blicher's originality: his tales were profoundly true to nature, his
scenery new and interesting, and his style had the directness of oral
narrative,

_En Landsbydegns Dagbog_ ("The Journal of a Parish Clerk") is probably
the most widely beloved of his tales. Certainly it combines all the
qualities of his finest work.  [Footnote: _A Degn_--parish clerk--in the
Lutheran churches of Scandinavia is the minister's assistant during
divine service, leading the singing of hymns and reciting some of the
prayers. He was also traditionally the schoolmaster of the village
elementary school. As a man of some education his position was an
intermediate one between the clergy and the villagers. Sometimes the
_Degn_ was a student of theology who had failed to pass his
examinations--as happened to two of Blicher's sons, who became village
_Degns._]

The matter of the story Blicher has partly taken from the history of the
celebrated Mistress Marie Grubbe who, like Blicher's Miss Sophie, was
born at Tjele. Her first husband was Count Ulrik Frederik Gyldenlöve,
natural son of the King, and governor of Norway. Marie ran away from him
with her sister's husband, a dissolute Danish nobleman, and for years
the couple travelled all over Europe, dissipating a tidy fortune. Then
Marie had to return to her father at Tjele. The double divorce of
Gyldenlöve from Marie and of Ane Grubbe from her adulterous husband left
the lady with a damaged reputation, and in the opinion of all sensible
people she ought to have been grateful for her good luck when a
neighboring squire nevertheless asked for her hand in marriage. But she
came to detest her second husband, too, and took for her lover the
overseer at Tjele, Sören Möller. After a thundering scandal and a second
divorce, Marie Grubbe married her peasant lover. When the young
Professor Holberg in 1711 fled plague-stricken Copenhagen, he went to
stay at a very modest inn on the island of Falster and discovered that
the innkeeper was Sören Möller and his landlady the former Countess
Gyldenlöve. Marie evidently took pleasure in meeting once again a young
man of culture and wide reading.  To the quietly friendly Norwegian she
spoke freely of her unusual life and told him how she had loathed her
first husband, who was considered the handsomest and most accomplished
gentleman in the Twin Kingdoms. And none of her other highborn lovers
had been able to hold her affection.  But she was perfectly satisfied
with her present husband, even if he beat her occasionally when he was
drunk. A short time afterwards Sören Möller killed a man and was
sentenced to hard labor for life. Marie carried on, keeping the inn for
sailors and fishermen, and died a year or so after her husband had been
taken away from her.

J. P. Jacobsen used the story of Marie Grubbe for an elaborate
psychological novel. Blicher has simplified the tale. His Miss Sophie is
a giddy young girl who has an affair with her father's gamekeeper and
elopes with him. When Morten Vinge, who loved the fair and gay young
creature, meets her again, she is a coarse and embittered and ugly old
harridan. Her sordid story is entirely without glamour, and it fills the
heart of Morten Vinge with revulsion and terrible sadness. Blicher also
has moved the story forward in time. Marie Grubbe was born in the middle
of the seventeenth century--Blicher's story is set in an
eighteenth-century milieu, the age he knew intimately from living
tradition. Blicher was quite well read in history, but like Sir Walter
Scott he is rarely able to make his stories come to life unless he tells
about the times of his father and grandfather. To him, as to Scott, the
atmosphere and the language of this age are the atmosphere and language
of his own childhood: here he had no need to imitate old letters and
writings--he culled the quaint and old-fashioned expressions from the
living lips of the old people around him, those he was fond of and those
he was afraid of or amused by, and he knew every shading in the old
folks' way of expressing human emotions. In that other masterpiece of
Blicher's, "The Parson at Vejlbye," the entries in the diary of the
young judge pulsate with the troubles and hopes of an upright,
high-spirited, and warmhearted man. The sedate language adequately
expresses his indignation at the attempt to corrupt his integrity, his
love for the parson's sweet daughter, his concern for his hot-tempered
father-in-law, his horror and his despair as the tragedy unfolds.

For "The Parson at Vejlbye" Blicher also utilized an old story, but
again treated it in his own way. According to the documents in the case,
some twenty years had passed since the disappearance of the servant of
Sören Quist, parson at Vejlbye, when plotters framed the evidence and
bought false witnesses who sent the luckless clergyman to his death
under the headman's axe. With his strong feeling for close-knit
composition, Blicher makes the discovery of the remains of Niels Bruus
occur immediately after the man's quarrel with the irascible Herr Sören
and his disappearance from the vicarage. The sleepwalker motif is
Blicher's own invention. It adds to the grimness of the tragedy that the
framed minister ultimately lets himself be persuaded to believe he must
be guilty, though unwittingly, of the murder of his hired man. But to
the fundamentally straight and honorable Herr Sören it is a consolation
to believe that he dies a victim of justice and not of injustice. To him
it would have spelled despair if he had been able to see through the
full hideousness of the plot that was his undoing.

The best tales of Blicher are those in which he tells the story of such
simple, strong, and loyal souls. This does not mean that these people
are simple-minded. Morten Vinge has a keen, curious, and adaptable mind.
The boy who spends his few pennies on a stack of Latin books just to
keep up his knowledge of the beloved language, even after he has had to
give up his hope of going to a Latin School, takes up quite as eagerly
the study of the French language which he hears the gentry speak. He
thoroughly enjoys his initiation in the gallant sport of hunting; for
all his kindheartedness he feels a healthy satisfaction when he has
proved he can fight and make a good soldier. His journal mirrors his
adaptable mind, but his heart never changes: from boyhood to old age
Morten Vinge remains the same true and good man, grateful towards
whoever befriends him, humble before God, and upright among men. The
parson at Vejlbye and his son-in-law, the judge, are canny Jutlanders
with plenty of sound common sense, but their emotional life is
beautifully simple and pure. The emigre French nobleman who ends his
days as gamekeeper with a rustic Jutland gentleman is a kind of
psychological detective, shrewdly unmasking the murderer of a young
peasant girl. Then he marries the other girl, for whose sake the
murderer killed his sweetheart, and gives his name to the unborn child
of the criminal. About his life with the young wife he married out of
chivalrous pity, enough is said when Blicher tells how the widow died of
a broken heart a short time after her elderly husband had been found
dead out in the heather. The gypsy woman Linka Smaelem, who carries her
crippled husband on her back, as they wander homeless all over Austria,
Germany, and the Jutland peninsula; Marie, the waif saved as a baby from
the Western Ocean; and Cecil, the daughter of the prosperous hosier, can
no more take back their hearts, once they have given their love to a
man, than they can stop their hearts from beating. Faithfulness with
them is scarcely a virtue, since it is the very essence of their being.

But so is their roguery to his knaves and thieves. Horrible, or merry
and winning, they follow the bent of their natures with perfect
simplicity and no conscience to trouble them. And his loose women cannot
possibly be called fallen women; they are amoral far more than immoral,
creatures to whom the rules and restrictions society tries to impose
upon their appetites have no real meaning. They overstep them as lightly
as they would a stile in a hedgerow. Miss Sophie, and Charlotte
Schinckel in "An Only Child"--whom Blicher had known when he was a small
boy--follow the bent of their natures without shame or remorse. If they
have to learn by experience that the primrose path leads to a sad
ending, they may turn bitter or subdued, but not repentant. In "Tardy
Awakening," written after Blicher had made the shattering discovery of
his own wife's unfaithfulness, he has drawn with a few light and sure
touches the picture of a promiscuous woman. Lazy and demure, she has
lulled her husband into an illusion that he is a happily married man:
_"Die holde Sittsamkeit bey Tage"_ is his whispered, rather indiscreet
confidence to his friend. The quotation is from Wieland and the whole
passage runs: _"Die Wohllust ist sie in der Nacht, die holde Sittsamkeit
bey Tage."_ He never suspected he was sharing her "love" with almost any
man who happened to be with her in a convenient situation.

The narrative style of Blicher is based partly upon the art of the
peasants who had been handing down their traditions and legends by word
of mouth and partly upon the way the old ladies and gentlemen of his
childhood used to talk. He must have possessed an unfalteringly
sensitive ear for variations in the inflections of voices and in the
ways people express themselves. His tales "Marie" and "The Hosier and
His Daughter" both tell the stories of young girls who lose their minds
when their deep and faithful love for a young man has been frustrated.
In both of them he uses the same device of letting an old woman tell the
tragedy of the girl. But what a subtle difference in the way they tell
it! The fisherman's widow from the stern west coast who says, "Look, out
there where ships are sailing now, there my cradle stood," whose men are
laid to rest somewhere out there beyond the sand bars, with all her pity
for Marie and Jörgen, is inured to hard fates and misery; and she tells
the story of the ill-fated lovers quietly and tersely. The hosier's
widow is much more voluble, and interrupts her narrative of the ghastly
end to the love between her daughter and the poor suitor--when he
returned prosperous and acceptable to Cecil's father--with sighs and
sorrowful exclamations. She has so long felt safe in her life of
comparative ease, and the terrible thing that destroyed her comfortable
household has left her broken, longing for sympathy even from the
stranger who happens to come to her door. Of course the style developed
by a more or less illiterate people for entertainment in the form of
storytelling, and for the oral preservation of their traditions, is
always highly elaborate, and at its best usually of consummate beauty
and vigor. Blicher loved and appreciated the values of this rural art of
storytelling. In his tales _Bette-Fanden_ (Little Scratch) and _Tre
Helligaftener_ ("Three Holiday Eves") [Footnote: Lutheran Protestantism
could never make the Scandinavian people give up the old custom of
keeping the eve of the great feasts of the liturgical year as half-holy
days, with celebrations in the evening--the Vigils of Catholic times.
The evening before Christmas is still in Denmark and Norway the holiest
and best beloved feast of the year.]  he uses it with perfect mastery.
The rules and theories of the rising school of Copenhagen esthetes, led
by the young and energetic Johan Ludvig Heiberg, he despised, and he had
not much patience with that brilliant would-be dictator of taste in
Denmark. Blicher, the realist before Realism, knew masters he liked
better. It was a custom in his part of Jutland for the peasants to
gather sometimes in a cottage or in a farm kitchen, to entertain each
other with singing and storytelling, while young and old, men and women,
busily knitted the stockings and mittens which were to earn for them the
ready money upon which their modest prosperity was built. The dialect of
Jutland--so different from the language of the educated part of the
nation and also from the dialects of the islands, that to Danes outside
the peninsula it is difficult to understand and sounds funny--had
scarcely ever been committed to writing, or at least only as a comical
element in plays and poems written in the common language. Blicher loved
this homely dialect, and in tales and poems where he used it, brought
out all its latent beauty and power to express the shy and sweet
emotions of a reticent and stronghearted people, the courage of men and
women faced with grief and hardship which they accept uncomplainingly,
the sly humor of a tribe who in an eminent degree have been gifted with
the Danish virtue of self-irony. When his collection of dialect stories
and ballads was published in 1842, under the title of _E Bindstouw_ (The
Knitting-Bee), fifteen years of loving labor lay behind the slim volume,
which has become a treasured classic of Danish literature.

Later, when his genius seemed on the wane, the danger of this narrative
style became apparent, and much of Blicher's work during his decline is
merely wordy and a little tiresome (though "Three Holiday Eves" was
written only a few years before he died). He himself was aware of his
tendency to become chatty and created an alter ego, his "Cousin Peer the
Fiddler" as the narrator of his loosely knit, usually only mildly
amusing, humorous tales. The wistfulness and resigned sadness of "Alas,
How Changed" is unique among the stones attributed to Peer Fiddler--many
of his own emotions during a life filled with frustrations went into it.




V


In 1825 Blicher was promoted to the living of Spentrup and Gassum, where
his uncle, Ernestine's first husband, had been pastor. In fact, when he
wrote his application for this appointment, he mentioned that it would
mean the fulfillment of his wife's dearest hope, if she might return to
the scenes of her happy youth. The income of the living of Spentrup and
Gassum was good enough, and together with the money he could make by his
writings it might have saved him financially, if he had not already been
so deep in debt, the father of a family of seven children besides a
stepchild, and a hopelessly bad manager.

However, to Steen Blicher the outlook for a while seemed quite bright.
He was reinstated in the good graces of the King, who even a couple of
times granted him modest sums of money from his private funds, as an aid
to pay his debts. According to the custom of the times, Blicher
addressed his supplications to the paternalistic monarch and asked for
assistance when his need became too pressing. In 1823 he had edited a
volume of poems called _Bautastene_ (Memorial Stones) about great and
good Danish men. It contained contributions from several well-known
authors. The best known today is Blicher's own ballad on Sören Kanne,
the peasant who saved a group of shipwrecked sailors. To the Danes, an
unmilitary but fiercely courageous people, the heroism of a lifesaver
has always seemed the finest kind of courage. Blicher now enjoyed some
recognition as an author, and in 1825 he severed his connection with Mr.
Elmquist and his _Laesefrugter_ and started as an editor with a
magazine of his own, _Nordlyset_ (The Northern Light). A printer in
near-by Randers was willing to act as publisher. However, when a tragedy
of his, _Johanna Grey,_ at long last, after several delays caused by a
management which did not have much faith in Blicher as a dramatist, was
produced at the Royal Theater in Copenhagen, it proved a failure and was
taken off the boards after three performances.

Of literary friends Blicher had only one who remained really close to
him through the years. Bernhard Severin Ingemann and Steen Steensen
Blicher seemed in many ways to be absolute contrasts--they were of
different natures, had different fates, and lived very different lives.
The young Ingemann had begun as a writer of highly exalted poetry,
romantic horror stories (some of them deserving to be included in the
volumes of spine-chillers that have again become the fashion, as they
are really good in a gruesome way), and had been very successful with
his romantic tragedies in smoothly flowing verse. He married his first
love, a young lady of delicate beauty and angelic virtue, and was given
a professorship at the academy of Sorö, a medieval abbey converted into
a public school on the lines of the English institutions.  In a
beautiful villa on the shores of a charming inland lake, Ingemann lived
a happy married life, the happiness somewhat damped by childlessness and
by the frail health of Mrs. Ingemann. His historical novels of the
Danish Middle Ages have been favorite reading for generations of Danish
children. But his lasting fame among the poets of Denmark he won by his
Morning and Evening Hymns, in which profound piety is blended with the
keenest sense of the moods and sights and sounds of the Danish
countryside. In verse of exquisite purity and naturalness he hails the
risen Christ in the sunrise of a Sunday morning in summer time.
Awakening birds and little children singing their hymns in the village
orphanage unite in a chorus of praise to the God of love.  Nightfall,
when the woods are swallowed up in darkness and silence under the stars,
brings to his lips the words of the disciples on the road to Emmaus,
"Remain with us, dear Master--."

Yet Ingemann was the one faithful friend who always understood Blicher's
genius, so unlike his own, and who never joined with those admirers who
murmured that, granted the poor parson of Spentrup was really an
extraordinarily gifted writer, more was the pity that he made such a
sorry mess of his life, and by and by became a disgrace to the cloth.

Blicher embarked upon his duties in his new parish with a great display
of energy--especially to promote the material well-being of his flock
with a number of projects of the kind he loved to make propaganda for.
Passionately as he loved his moors, he nevertheless dreamed of making at
least parts of the wide wasteland add something to the natural resources
of his country. When the _Ahl,_ the hard crust of stonelike sand or
porous sandstone, was broken, it must be possible to plant hardy
evergreens some places on the moor and by and by get a crop of fuel
other than the peat the Jutlanders were wont to burn. And perhaps some
time, when the land had been prepared by the planting of pine forests,
it might become arable. Blicher's idea of utilizing the moors was taken
up by Colonel Enrico Dalgas, after Denmark in 1864 had lost Holstein and
Slesvig to Germany, under the slogan: "What we have lost without can be
won within." Under Dalgas' untiring leadership the reclamation of this
barren though beautiful part of Jutland became a reality--today the
parts of Blicher's Jutland that are still left untouched by cultivation
are protected as national parks. But Blicher had the vision--and at
great expense he planted in pine some outlying land belonging to the
vicarage. Never chary when he could lay hands on a bit of cash, he gave
the money for a bathing pool and gymnastic equipment for the village
school, so that the children would get some athletic training. He
resumed his advocacy for the cultivation of flax, for the draining of
marshy meadows, and a number of other causes which he considered of
national importance.

Since the Blichers had moved to Spentrup, old Pastor Niels Blicher, no
longer able to fulfill the duties of a minister, had made his home with
them. Steen Blicher and his father were deeply attached to each other.
Theirs were kindred natures with the same love of the land and the
folkways of Jutland, and the close companionship between father and son
was a source of much happiness to both men. But Blicher's wife could
scarcely have been pleased to have a father-in-law, who was gradually
growing blind and dependent on other people's help, added to the
household.

It seems that Blicher did not suspect, until Fate dealt him the blow
from which he never recovered, that there was anything wrong with his
marriage. He was satisfied with his "sweet Neste," and if she scolded
him for his untidy habits, indifference to his personal appearance, and
disregard of his clerical dignity, if she complained of their straitened
circumstances and the crowd of young children teeming all over their
poor home, her husband listened calmly, with some vague consoling words.
He took for granted that such scenes occurred among all married couples.
He made no bones about the fact that he was partial to his hunting
flask, and when among boon companions he freely imbibed the national
beverage of Jutland, _Thevandsknaegt_--hot strong tea liberally laced
with the cheap rum that flowed plentifully into Denmark as long as she
possessed her colonies in the Virgin Islands. He felt sure that if his
family was not better provided for, certainly it was not his fault. He
was a hardworking man, always busy with his numerous activities.
Moreover, he was a tender father and an affectionate husband--surely
Ernestine had no serious reason to be dissatisfied, now they were
settled in her dear old home in Spentrup.

Some among Blicher's biographers have made out a case for the defense of
Mrs. Blicher. Certainly she had plenty of reasons to complain of her lot
as the wife of Steen Blicher. The modest fortune left to her by her
first husband had disappeared in no time at all under his hands.
Ernestine liked to have a nice, comfortable home, and she was a
competent housekeeper, but it was impossible to keep her house well
ordered, clean, and neat with all those children about and her husband
trampling all over her scrubbed floors in muddy boots, dirty from the
fields, dirty from duck-hunting, letting his dogs run all over the
place, dropping his guns and papers and samples of his agricultural and
other experiments at random. A woman born to be a poet's wife, with an
understanding of her husband's genius, might have had the patience and
forbearance necessary to put up with Blicher's lack of domestic virtues
and make their marriage a success of a sort in spite of all. Ernestine
was not in the least interested in the literary efforts of her husband
and boasted that she had never read a line of the "trash" he wrote. She
liked lively company and going to great and noisy parties, she loved
dancing and flirting, and when the well-to-do farmers of the
neighborhood with their servants and guests gathered for an evening's
merrymaking, as the local custom was, Mrs. Blicher would appear and take
part in the fun with more abandon than her husband's confreres and
especially their wives thought seemly for the wife of a minister.

In the Scandinavian countries December 11 is Term Day, popularly called
the Devil's birthday. Blicher in his memoirs darkly hints at a Term Day
which forever terminated his illusions about happiness on earth. On
December 11, 1827, the birthday of Ernestine Blicher had been celebrated
in the vicarage of Spentrup. In the night after the party Blicher
chanced to surprise Ernestine and one of their guests in a situation
that no wishful thinking could explain away. Early in the new year
Blicher wrote to his bishop that circumstances had forced him to
separate from his wife.

It never came to a legal separation. Mrs. Blicher took rooms in the
neighboring town of Randers, and her husband himself drove her to her
new abode. Outside her front door he solemnly kissed his wife, saying,
"Good-bye, sweet Ernestine, now we two are never to meet again." Before
long it was the talk of the town that Pastor Blicher called on his wife
almost every day. When her baby was born it seems that Blicher refused
at first to acknowledge it, but after a while he accepted the paternity
and even came to be quite fond of the boy. Less than a year after the
fatal Term Day, Ernestine Blicher was back again in the vicarage. But
the patched-up marriage rapidly deteriorated. A tenth child was born to
the Blichers--a feeble-minded little girl. Steen Blicher and Ernestine
drifted apart more and more. Soon they rarely saw each other or
exchanged words--they stayed under the same roof, and that was all.
Ernestine developed a taste for young and brawny farm hands. At one time
her husband's coachman was her favorite. And he had successors. A
neighboring parson sadly commented on the conditions in the parish of
Spentrup, "The Pastor is a drunkard, his wife Magna Adultera."

Yet Steen Blicher carried on his efforts to promote a number of causes
aimed at the improvement of the material and spiritual conditions of the
people. His work on a description of the Shire of Viborg and another on
the Shire of Skanderborg furnished him with excuses for rambling widely
all over Jutland. And the old complaint that he neglected his duties as
clergyman were raised in Spentrup and Gassum, as they had been heard
from Thorning and Lysgaard. His insatiable curiosity about human nature
and his kindly understanding of all sorts and conditions of men made him
seek the hospitality of laymen and colleagues everywhere, but he could
not help feeling that he was not everywhere a welcome guest. It was a
long, long time since the young Steen Blicher had been a "mahogany
fellow." The Pastor of Spentrup was disgracefully indifferent to
cleanliness and looked a fright in his dirty old clothes; and as
everybody knew, he drank too much, whenever he had an opportunity to do
so. It may have been a feeling of kinship, a mixed emotion of pity and
envy, which made Steen Blicher devote so much of his interest and
sympathy to the study of the alien, dark-skinned people that flitted
mysteriously all over the Jutland peninsula, with no fixed abodes, even
if they had their favorite haunts in out-of-the-way places on the moor.
They called themselves Wanderers or Travellers, but the peasants' name
for them was _Natmaend,_ nightmen, or _Kjeltringer,_ rogues. Undoubtedly
there was a strong gypsy strain in the Jutland rogues--drawings by
contemporary artists as well as old photographs in the files of the
police show that much. But they had forgotten their native Romany
language and adopted _Rotvaelsk,_ the secret language of crooks and
thieves in Germany and Austria--in fact, many of them extended their
wanderings from Jutland far down into Central Europe and back again.
Besides his famous tale of the faithful gypsy woman and her crippled
man, Blicher wrote a great deal about the Wandering People in his
topographical as well as in his fictional work. In a short story, "The
Unbaptized," he tells about the faithful love of two gypsy brothers
from the day they stood as small boys by the corpse of their mother,
killed in a roadside brawl, until their death as old men. In "A
Fortnight in Jutland" he has sketched the famous female robber chieftain
Big-Margrethe, not without sympathy. And to the end of his life he took
a keen interest in their language and their habits.




VI


In 1835 the leading Copenhagen publishing house of Reitzel decided to
bring out an edition of Blicher's collected short stories. And in 1836
he managed to get financial aid, so that he could make a journey into
Sweden, apparently in connection with his plan to write a dictionary of
peasant dialects. This was the only time Steen Blicher ever left his
native land. Almost all the other Danish writers who were his
contemporaries travelled widely abroad--in Germany, France, and above
all in Italy, which to the Danish painters and poets of the Golden Age
became another spiritual mother country. Hans Christian Andersen, who in
spite of his innumerable handicaps was a man of terrifying vitality and
indomitable will power, even managed to see Turkey, to make a voyage on
the Danube, to visit princes in Germany and Dickens in England. Steen
Blicher after his short trip to Sweden never had another opportunity to
go abroad. He yearned to see England and Norway, but even the short
voyage to the latter country he was never able to make.

His transfer to the relatively good living of Spentrup and Gassum, and
his income from his literary work--at times quite
considerable--nevertheless failed to help him out of the financial
quagmire which more and more engulfed poor Pastor Blicher. He was the
father of ten children and had for years cared for his old blind father;
also for some time he had sheltered the three orphaned children of his
younger brother in his home. Now his older children were growing up, and
it soon became evident that they could not possibly be called promising
young people, at least not as to their prospects of worldly success. Of
his sons only the eldest, Peder Daniel, ever graduated from the
University of Copenhagen. Following in the footsteps of his forefathers,
he became a minister in one of the smallest and poorest parishes in
Denmark, He was never promoted to a better one and resigned, while he
was still a fairly young man, eking out an existence on his small
pension and whatever money he could make by teaching. Blicher's second
son, Jens Fredrik, lingered on for years as a student of divinity in
Copenhagen, but never passed the final examinations. Finally he married
and became a _Landsbydegn._ And a _Landsbydegn_ also became the third
son, Francisco--named by his father after a Spanish officer, a friend of
his youth. For the younger Blicher boys a University education was out
of the question. According to their father, one was "in the
transportation business," that is, he became an omnibus driver in
Copenhagen. Another was an assistant in a bookshop, another employed "in
agriculture." His stepson, Niels Blicher, had been considered a wild,
bad boy ever since he was an adolescent--which probably was not entirely
the fault of young Niels. In the opinion of their neighbors, his mother
hated the boy and did her best to drive him out of the home. So Niels
enlisted for service with the troops on the Virgin Islands, got into
trouble, was somehow redeemed by his stepfather, but afterwards went
from bad to worse. Among the tribulations of Steen Blicher's last years
was the periodic appearance of Niels, a tramp and a drunkard, not
unacquainted with the police in several places of northern Jutland.

Blicher evidently was a tender father, even if he was utterly unable to
influence his offspring for their own good. In his various supplications
for assistance he speaks of all his children as "dependent," years after
the older ones were of an age when they ought to have been
self-supporting. The children evidently preferred to stay in the poor
and disorderly home, dependent on their easygoing father whom they loved
and admired, and whose shortcomings and faults they copied, with sad
consequences to themselves. The judgment of people who had known the
sons of Steen Blicher is rather unanimous: they were all nice, friendly
men, but, more is the pity, they were quite unable to resist the
temptation of the bottle.

Of Blicher's daughters the eldest, Christiane, was supposed to keep
house for this family of lazy and inefficient males. His second
daughter, Malvina, was his favorite child. When Blicher in 1837 was
taken seriously ill with rheumatic fever, Malvina nursed him in a way
that earned for her her father's touching gratitude, expressed in simple
and moving stanzas. Next summer she married a landless farmer, Rasmus
Berg, and the couple took over the farming of the parsonage acres of
Spentrup. They did not succeed as farmers either in Spentrup or any of
the other places where they tried their luck, and according to the talk
of the neighborhood the fault was mainly Malvina's. She was no good as a
farmer's wife, spending her time reading, playing, and singing and doing
a little fine needlework, but never putting her hands to honest hard
work. Her husband gallantly insisted that he was to blame for this, he
loved her so much, he would not permit her to become a drudge. Malvina
Blicher is said to have been very pretty, taking after her mother as to
looks, but, thank God, not as to morals.

Complaints of the way Pastor Blicher fulfilled, or failed to fulfill,
his duties as a minister piled up. So did his debts. He was in arrears
with his taxes for years, and unpaid bills flooded the vicarage. Sorrow
and troubles, together with the memory of his late serious illness,
filled him with a new, resigned sadness. In the opening stanzas of his
poem _Traekfuglene, En Naturconcert_ (Migrating Birds, a Concert of
Nature) he speaks in simple and beautiful lines about his own death,
which may be approaching--he too is a migrating bird, and he has heard
the voice of Winter; maybe the cage will soon be opened and the prisoner
of life set free. But his intimate knowledge of bird life and his
eternal love of Danish nature allowed him to forget his melancholy, as
he lovingly observed and vividly sketched the annual procession of
migrating birds over Jutland, in one of his loveliest works.

Undaunted in spite of all his misfortunes, Steen Blicher busied himself
with all the questions and causes he felt in duty bound to support as a
Danish patriot. As he advanced in years, his outlook had become more and
more liberal, not to say radical. In so far he followed a trend common
to an increasing number of Danes. Though their love for the person of
their old King Frederik VI was as warm and sincere as ever, the nation
had seen how his policy had time and again led Denmark to the very brink
of disaster. Now it was evident to most Danes that the old trust in an
autocratic monarch who singlehanded, or almost singlehanded, managed the
vital interests of the country, was outdated. The times of the
eighteen-thirties were serious, the immediate future seemed fraught with
grave dangers. Now the nation must demand its right to participate when
the fate of Denmark was to be decided.

One of the burning questions of the day was the growing tension between
the kingdom and the united duchies of Slesvig and Holstein. Holstein was
German land and had always been peopled by Germans, Slesvig was
fundamentally and purely Danish. But according to an old treaty of 1460
it had been declared that under one Duke the two principalities were to
be _"up ewig ungedeelt"--_never to be separated. The German minority
within the realm of Denmark had unearthed this old document and worked
it for all it was worth as an excuse to hasten the German infiltration
of Slesvig, the introduction of the German language in the church and in
the schools, of German usages and bylaws, of German officialdom in
Slesvig. The plan of the Holsteiners was to join the league of German
principalities and drag Slesvig along with them. The fact that the King
was growing very old, that he had no son, and that the right of his
cousin, the Crown Prince, to inherit the Dukedom could be disputed
according to the Holstein rules of succession, aggravated the situation.

To meet the emergency of the troubled times, in 1831, King Frederik by a
decree had created advisory councils, to be elected by representatives
of the Estates of the realm. There were to be four of these Advisory
Assemblies, one for the Danish Islands, one for Jutland, one for
Slesvig, and one for Holstein. Though they were given only advisory
powers, the statutes granted them a great deal of real influence. They
were empowered to propose new laws and amendments, and all new laws of
the realm were to be presented for them to scrutinize and express
judgment upon, especially laws pertaining to taxation and matters which
might impose new burdens on the people. However, when the Assemblies,
according to the opinion of the King, were too outspoken in their
criticism of the financial situation, which certainly was bad, and when
a crop of newspapers, most of them devoted to criticism of the
government, sprouted in the wake of the Assemblies, King Frederik became
indignant and in a proclamation to his subjects told them that We, the
royal We, are alone capable of judging the true interests of Our
kingdom. This of course gave new impetus to the budding political
radicalism in Denmark. Yet, when the old King died in 1839, all Denmark
mourned him wholeheartedly as a good man of profound integrity, a true
father of his people, and a man tried through great and bitter
misfortunes.

His successor, Christian VIII, was received with great expectations. As
a young prince he had been governor of Norway in 1814, when the Union
with Denmark came to an end and the Norwegians took their fate into
their own hands, proclaiming, in defiance of all the European powers,
that their country was free, sovereign, and would be independent.
Elected to be king of Norway under the name of Christian Frederik, he
promulgated the Norwegian Constitution of May 17, 1814, at that time the
most radically democratic any European state had dared to write for
itself. But when it became evident that to preserve her independence
Norway would have to make her peace with Sweden and accept Bernadotte as
her future king on condition that he leave the Constitution intact and
the sovereignty of Norway respected, Christian Frederik loyally
abdicated and left the land he had loved with youthful ardor. "To save
the Constitution is the all-important thing." Now the Danes hoped he
would listen to the public demand for a democratic constitution and give
to Denmark something like the Constitution of Norway. However, with
Christian VIII youth and youthful ardor were things of the past. He was
perfectly aware that the time for absolute monarchy was over, but he
believed in gradual progress, and the introduction of democracy by
stages--not least because of the perils rampant in a realm with a strong
minority of German nationality intriguing and looking for opportunities
to make trouble and tear a bit of Denmark away from the mother country.
For, above all, Christian VIII had become a Danish patriot, passionately
eager to secure the welfare of his country.

Meanwhile, Steen Blicher all on his own had started agitation for an
idea which--like so many of Blicher's ideas--was to succeed only
partially during his lifetime, but nevertheless was destined to become
an influence in the spiritual life of the Danish people in times to
come. He would summon Danish men and women to a meeting on the
Himmelbjerg, the highest point in Jutland--and, for that matter, in all
Denmark. Here, during a popular festival assembly, representatives of
all classes and walks of life in the nation were to meet in a patriotic
endeavor to strengthen the national consciousness of all Danes and make
them pledge themselves to work for the good of their native land.

Himmelbjerg means "Heaven Hill," and the Danes, when teased because of
this ambitious name for a hill of very modest elevation, will eagerly
explain that the name was not given because any Danes imagined their
highest hill as soaring towards the skies, but because the view from the
summit is of heavenly beauty. At the foot of the wooded slopes lovely
lakes, surrounded by great forests, feed the calm rivers and rivulets
that meander towards the distant horizon and the expanse of dark moors,
through beautiful valleys where fine farms nestle in the folds of the
landscape. Blicher had discovered this glorious view on one of his long
hikes, away from domestic troubles and the tedious duties of a parish
priest. He had used it as a backdrop for one of his tales, and the
rather indifferent story is relieved by beautiful word pictures of the
landscape. Evidently he had never forgotten his first impression of the
spot, where the glories of his beloved land had unfolded so movingly
before his eyes.

The first Himmelbjerg festival took place in 1839, with Blicher as the
leader and main speaker. It was a great success, even if the
participation was not too large--for it was a new departure. But the
young people who had gathered under his pulpit were enthusiastic about
the whole idea, and the singing of Danish songs and the merrymaking were
all Blicher could have hoped for. Among his topics was the new national
army based on extended conscription, which he hailed with jubilation;
since among the Danes service in the army of their country was
considered a privilege and an honor. He called upon all Danes to pledge
themselves to a sacred cause, the strengthening of true Danishness. His
fanciful idea, that the Danes ought to introduce a "national costume"
and free themselves from dependence on the fashions of foreign lands, as
well as his proposal that all Danes should address each other with the
hearty _Du_ (Thou) of the peasant dialects, were more in the line of
fads, fondly cherished by this unconventional clergyman.

Meanwhile his private affairs had arrived at a crisis. In the fall of
1839 an auction was called at the vicarage of Spentrup. Furniture,
livestock, etc., belonging to Pastor Blicher was to be publicly
auctioned away to cover his unpaid taxes and sundry other debts. Among
articles to be sold the advertisement mentioned the iron stoves of the
house. This at last roused the admirers of Blicher the poet, and the
leading newspaper of Jutland, the _Randers Avis,_ in moving words called
upon the readers to contribute to the collection it had started, to "pay
a first installment on a sacred national debt" and relieve the Bard of
Jutland of his financial embarrassment. The collection turned out a
success: well-to-do people responded with donations, some of them very
generous. But what touched Steen Blicher to the quick was the
innumerable contributions of small sums from the common people, many of
them veritable widow's mites. The auction was staved off, and for a time
Steen Blicher's economic misery was substantially relieved.

In 1840 the Himmelbjerg festival very nearly failed to come off. The
owner of the grounds protested that his crops and pasture lands had been
so badly damaged by the crowds making their way to the summit, he did
not want to see them there another year. Blicher let loose his scorn and
fury in the papers. But King Christian VIII came to the rescue; he
bought the grounds where the festivals were to be held as well as the
right of way up to the top of the hill. Now the future of the
Himmelbjerg meetings seemed secure. And Blicher joyfully accepted the
nickname, given him first by scoffers at the proceedings, the
Himmelbjerg Parson.

The Himmelbjerg festivals were attacked with considerable bitterness by
German and German-minded newspapers. After all, the peninsula of Jutland
from Holstein to the spit of Skagen is a small area, and the leaders of
the attempts at Germanization of South Jutland were perfectly aware
that the counterblast launched by the Danish poet-pastor might easily
become a grave menace to their activities. Blicher replied with a call
to all Danes to liberate themselves from German bureaucracy--he hated
with all his heart this hardy perennial weed.

But from 1843 on Blicher was quietly pushed aside from his post as
leader of the Himmelbjerg festivals and deprived of his cherished part
as the soul and spirit of the meetings. There were various reasons. And
in spite of the fact that this loss of leadership was to Steen Blicher a
heartbreaking tragedy, it is not too difficult to understand why many of
his original co-workers tried to put the old man in a less conspicuous
place at the festivals.

The Danes have a word for a drunkard; they say he is _forfalden.
Forfalden til staerke Drikke_ is the whole phrase, and it means a man is
enslaved by his love of hard liquor. But taken singly the word
_forfalden_ also means disintegrating, ruined. And it seems that even
the most fervent admirers of Steen Blicher's genius could hardly refute
the charges made against him by decent everyday people--such as his
fellow ministers of the diocese, and well-to-do citizens of the
district, not to mention his poor parishioners: genius or no genius, Mr.
Blicher was sadly _forfalden,_ disintegrating as a character, and a
disgrace to the cloth.

Once, when as a young girl I visited my mother's home in Denmark and
discussed with a young lad, a friend and fellow-Blicherite, the merits
of the master's work, my old great-aunt, herself a parson's daughter
from Jutland, interrupted us brutally, "Oh, yes, he was a very gifted
poet. But, children, if you had seen him! He visited us once at
Laestrup--he was forever wandering all over the country; he never stayed
in his parish. He was filthier than any of the beggars that used to come
to our back door. And lousy--oh, yes, he was that, too. The maid who had
to clean his room when he left us the next day was quite sick with
disgust.--No, I never met Mr. Blicher--Mother would not permit us girls
to come into the living room when he called at our home." I shall never
forget the pang of grief and pity I felt at the words of the old lady,
nor the fury of my friend at her narrow-mindedness. The worst of it was
that this aunt of mine was really an exceedingly broad-minded old woman.
Imbued with the ideas of the eighteenth century, she was so broad-minded
as to scare and scandalize the bourgeois mind of another generation by
her opinions on life and human nature.

But worse than by his filthy habits and his lack of restraint when the
bottles appeared on a convivial table in cottage or hall, Steen Blicher
disgusted even admirers of his literary work by his brazen attempts to
borrow money from friends or stray acquaintances. The relief afforded
him by the national collection proved to have been temporary--very much
so.

His mismanagement of his ministerial duties had become a scandal that
had to be stopped. So in 1841 he was granted from public funds a subsidy
that would enable him to engage a curate and devote himself to his
writing and other activities. It was intimated that if his son, Jens
Frederik, would finish his studies, so that he could be ordained and
return to Spentrup as his father's curate, that would be a very
satisfactory solution. But Jens Frederik did not pass his examinations.
And so a certain Mr. Lakiaer moved in as curate to Mr. Blicher.

To celebrate his liberation from the onerous duties of his parishes, and
to look after his interests with the publishers, Steen Blicher travelled
to Copenhagen and remained for several weeks in the capital. But he did
not get in very close touch with literary circles. He took a fancy to
the low taverns that line the old canals, the haunts of sailors, but
also of all the riffraff that prey on sailors ashore. Blicher, who
always felt perfectly at ease among the so-called common people, may
have enjoyed the company as much as the bad liquor. But when he emerged,
drunk and quarrelsome, he several times collided with the Copenhagen
police--and rumor probably did nothing to minimize the disgraceful
nature of his escapades in the underworld of Copenhagen.

Meanwhile it looked as if Mr. Lakiaer got along very well with the
family in Spentrup, and soon he became engaged to marry the eldest
daughter, Christiane--according to the time-honored custom of
Scandinavian clerical homes, where the curate usually marries the
minister's daughter, if such a female is available. But one Sunday
morning, when Christiane entered the bedroom of her fiance to bring him
the usual Danish morning snack, a cup of tea and some slices of bread
and butter, before he had to get up and go about his duty in the village
church, Mr. Lakiaer lay dead in his bed. He had committed suicide,
putting a bullet through his brain.

To Blicher and his family this was a shattering grief. And the vacancy
after Mr. Lakiaer was never filled; Blicher was not to get another
curate. Jens Frederik had accepted a situation as a _Landsbydegn_ and
given up the idea of becoming a minister. Blicher and his parishioners
had to get along as well, or as badly, as they could.

But in this time of his deepest misery Steen Blicher was still able to
write some of his artistically most finished short stories. And even if
most of _E Bindstouw,_ his garland of dialect stories and poems, had
been written years ago, he must have put the finishing touches to this
masterpiece of his before it was published in 1842. And there is other
evidence that Steen Blicher possibly was not so ruined by drink as his
kind neighbors would make out to be the case. His Jutland stubbornness
as well as his ingrained dislike of order, cleanliness, and rules of
conventional behavior may have induced him willfully to appear more
broken down by an irregular life than he really was. One of his
biographers--Jeppe Aakiaer, I believe--has unearthed a number of small
notebooks in which Blicher after his hunting trips used to enter the bag
of the day. These entries prove that almost up to the end of his life he
was the same splendid marksman he had been since he was a mere youth.
And it seems improbable that he could have retained such sureness of eye
and hand, if he had been as badly _forfalden_ as he was supposed to be.

When Reitzel in 1846 published his collected short stories and poems in
six volumes, Blicher had won nation-wide recognition: together with a
great deal of dross and many things stamped with the carelessness of too
hasty production, there were gems that will be treasured by his people
as long as the Danes speak and write Danish. But next year, in 1847, the
inevitable happened: Pastor Blicher was requested to apply for a release
from his office as minister to the twin parishes of Spentrup and
Gassum.

Pastor Blicher had to apply, so that he could be "graciously relieved"
with a pension. And while his fate, and the fate of his former parish,
was still pending, Death mercifully relieved Steen Blicher from the
sorrows and cares of life.

Christian VIII died on January 20, 1848, and with grave misgivings the
Danish people saw his son and heir, unreliable, unpredictable Prince
Frederik, ascend to the throne in a time of dire peril to the country.
And on March 23 open insurrection broke out in Holstein. But when it
happened Steen Blicher was on his deathbed in his bare, poor study in
the vicarage of Spentrup. A lingering typhoid fever slowly drained the
life out of him. His son Francisco and his daughter-in-law, who had been
sent for, were the only ones to be with him when he passed away, quietly
as a candle burns out.

The "Prisoner of Life" was set free; the strange bird who had always
known that his life on earth was a migration towards another world had
left the land that had become too wintry for him. Of the ideas he had
broadcast so liberally, with such disregard for what ordinary
common-sense people mean by happiness and the respect of one's fellow
men, very many became firmly rooted in the soil of Denmark, to flourish
in times of adversity and in times of prosperity for the nation,
spreading like the forests he had dreamed of, which were to make his
barren moors fertile and life-giving to his people, even if the price
must be the passing of that wild and melancholy beauty that had been the
true home of his heart. His fame as one of the great masters of the
Danish tongue, and as a mind that knew the mind of his own race more
intimately than most others, has grown through the years--overshadowing
the memory of his frailties and his misfortunes, until the tragedy of
Steen Blicher's life only made his genius dearer to his nation.





THE JOURNAL OF A PARISH CLERK

[_En Landsbydegns Dagbog,_ 1824]


FÖULUM, January 1, 1708.

GOD give us all a happy New Year! and preserve our good Pastor Sören. He
blew out the candle last night, and mother says he will not live to see
next New Year; but I dare say it means nothing.--We had a merry evening.
When Pastor Sören took off his cap after supper, and said _"Agamus
gratias,"_ he pointed to me instead of to Jens. It is the first time I
have said grace in Latin. A year ago today Jens said it, and then I
opened my eyes wide, for then I didn't understand a word, but now I know
half of Cornelius. Just think if I could become pastor at Föulum! Oh,
how happy my dear parents would be if they might live to see that day.
And then if the Pastor's Jens could become bishop of Ribe--as his father
says--well, who can tell? It is all in God's hands. His will be done!
_Amen in nomine Jesu._

FÖULUM, September 3, 1708.

Yesterday by the grace of God I completed my fifteenth year. Now Jens is
not much ahead of me in Latin. I work harder at home than he does; I
study hard while he is running about with Peer Gamekeeper. That's hardly
the way to become a bishop. I am sorry for Pastor Sören; he can't help
seeing it. The tears come into his eyes sometimes when he says, _"Mi
fili! mi fili! otium est pulvinar diaboli_."--At New Year we shall begin
the study of Greek. Pastor Sören has given me a Greek Testament.
"They're queer crow's feet, are they not? They must seem like a
whetstone in your eyes," he said kindly, and pinched my ear, as he
always does when he is pleased. But heyday, won't he be surprised when
he finds that I can read it quite fast already!

FÖULUM, _die St. Martini._

Things are going badly with Jens. Pastor Sören was so angry with him
that he talked Danish to him all day. To me he spoke in Latin. I once
overheard him saying to himself, _"Vellem hunc esse filium meum"_ He
meant me. And how Jens did stammer at his Cicero! I know very well why,
for day before yesterday, while his father was attending a wedding in
Vinge, he was with Peer Gamekeeper in Lindum woods, and--God help us!--a
wild boar had torn his breeches. He lied to his mother and said the
Thiele bull had done it, but she gave him a good box on the
ear--_habeat!_

FÖULUM, _Calendis Januar, 1709._

_Proh, dolor_ Pastor Sören is dead. _Vae me miserum!_ When we had sat
down to the table Christmas Eve he put away his spoon and looked long
and sadly at Jens. _"Fregisti cor meum"_ he said with a sigh, and went
into his bedchamber. Alas, he never rose again. I have visited him every
day since then, and he has given me much good advice and admonition; but
now I shall never see him again. Thursday I saw him for the last time.
Never shall I forget what he said, after a very moving address to me,
"God, give my son an upright heart!" He folded his thin hands, and sank
back on the pillow. _"Pater! in manus tuas committo spiritum meum."_
Those were his last words. When I saw the mistress put her apron to her
eyes, I ran out of the room, feeling very unhappy. Jens was standing
outside the door, crying. _"Seras dat poenas turpi poenitentia,"_ I
thought, but he fell on my neck and sobbed. God forgive him his
wildness! That is what has grieved me most.

FÖULUM, _Pridie iduum Januarii MDCCIX._

Yesterday my dear father went to Viborg to arrange for my dinners when I
am to go to school. How I long for that time to come! I study all day,
but the days are so short now, and mother says we cannot afford to use
candles to read by. I can't make head or tail of that letter to
Tuticanus. No--things were different when the good Pastor Sören was
living. _Eheu mortuus est!_

It is a terrible winter. Heaven and earth are one whirl; there is a
snowdrift that reaches to the rooftree of our barn. Last night Jens shot
two hares in our vegetable garden--he seems to have forgotten his poor
father. But if Peer Gamekeeper finds out about it, there will be
trouble.

FÖULUM, _Idibus Januarii MDCCIX._

Father has not come home yet, and the weather is as bad as ever. If only
he does not lose his way! There is Jens on top of our barn carrying his
gun and a brace of birds in his hand--he is coming in here.

They were partridges he had shot on Mads Madsen's dunghill, and he
wanted mother to roast them for him, but she was afraid of the squire,
and refused.

FÖULUM, _XVIII Calend. Februar._

Alas the day! My dear father is frozen to death. The man at Kokholm
found him in a snowdrift and brought him home in his cart. I have cried
till I can't see out of my eyes--and mother, too. God help us both!

FÖULUM, February 18, 1709.

I hardly know Jens; he had gotten a green coat and a green feather in
his hat. "There, you can see," he said. "Now I'm a hunter. What are you?
A schoolboy, a Latin grind!"--"Yes, God help us," I replied. "There will
be no more Latin. I can become a pastor where you're a bishop. My mother
is not going to starve to death while I sing at people's doors in
Viborg. I have to stay home and earn a living for her. Oh, Jens, if your
father had lived!"--"Don't let us talk about it," he said. "Anyway, I'd
never in all my days have learned Latin--devil take the stupid stuff!
Why don't you try to get service at the squire's? There you'll have a
fine time and live well."--"How should I get in there?" I
replied.--"We'll try anyway," said Jens, and ran away. After all, Jens
has a kind heart, but he is wild and flighty. Six weeks ago he buried
his sainted father, and three weeks ago his mother followed her husband.
But now it is as if it didn't concern him. He can cry one moment, and
laugh the next.

THIELE, May 1, 1709.

So now I am a servant in the squire's family. Good-bye pastorate!
Good-bye Latin! Oh, my precious books! _Valete, pluri-mum! Vendidi
libertatem_ for twelve dollars. The eight must go to my poor mother, and
the squire has promised her besides a part in all the trees that are
felled in the forest, so she will neither freeze nor starve. It is
really Jens who has gotten me this place. He has a lot to say here in
the big house. He is a devil of a fellow, or rather cock of the walk.
The housekeeper put a big piece of cake in his hand; the dairy woman
smirked at him, the chambermaid likewise, and even one of the young
ladies nodded kindly as she passed him. It looks as if he may become
gamekeeper in place of Peer. The worst of it is that he has gotten into
the habit of swearing worse than any sailor.

THIELE, March 12, 1709.

I am getting along very well, God be thanked. We are six servants to
wait on the master and mistress, the young master, and the two young
ladies. I have time to read, and I don't neglect my beloved books. Of
course it is not of any use, but I can't leave them alone. Yesterday the
books of our dear Pastor Sören were sold. I bought for two dollars and
got as many as I could carry away. Among them were a number of Ovidius;
one is entitled _Ars amoris_ and another _Remedium amoris._ I am going
to read them first; I do want to know what they are all about. Once I
happened to get hold of them in Pastor Sören's study, but he snatched
them away from me, saying, _"Abstine manus!_ Hands off! That's nothing
for you."

THIELE, June 3, 1709.

If I could only learn French! The family never speak anything but French
at table, and I don't understand a word of it. Today they were speaking
about me, for they looked at me several times. Once I came near dropping
a plate. I was standing right behind Miss Sophie's chair, when she
turned and looked me full in the face. She is a beautiful young lady,
Miss Sophie--it is a joy to look at her.

THIELE, September 13, 1709.

Yesterday was a day full of commotion. The family from Viskum were here,
and there was a big hunt. I was along and had one of the squire's guns.
At first all went well, but then a wolf passed close to me. I was so
frightened, I almost dropped the gun, and quite forgot to shoot. Jens
was standing by my side and shot the wolf. "You're a blockhead," he
said, "but I won't tell on you." Soon after the squire passed me.
"You're a bungler, Martin," he said. "You must have been bribed."--"I
humbly beg your pardon, sir," I replied. "I am quite innocent, but
someone must have slandered me. God helping, I will serve you honestly
and truly, sir." At that he was pleased to laugh, and said, "You're a
great bungler." But that was not the end of it, for when the family were
at table they began to talk about the wolf again, asked me, "How much
did he give you?" and so forth. I don't know just what they meant, but
at least I could understand that they were making fun of me in French
and in Danish, too. Even Miss Sophie was laughing at me to my face--that
hurt me most of all. I wonder if I couldn't learn that snuffling
gibberish. Surely it can't be more difficult than Latin.

THIELE, October 2, 1709.

It's not impossible--I see that now. French is nothing but garbled
Latin. In a box of old books that I bought there was a French
translation of _Metamorphoses_--it came in quite pat. The Latin I had
learned before. But one thing seems odd to me. When I listen to them
talking up there, I can't make out a French word in what they are
saying--it's certainly not Ovidius they're discussing.

I must learn to shoot. The squire wants me to go along when he hunts,
but there I can never please him; he either scolds me or laughs at
me--and sometimes he does both at once: I don't carry the gun right, I
don't take aim right, and I don't shoot right. "Look at Jens!" says the
squire. "He's a hunter. You carry the gun as if it were a scythe slung
over your shoulder, and when you take aim you look as if you were
falling backward." Miss Sophie, too, laughs at me--but laughing is very
becoming to her; she has such beautiful teeth.

THIELE, November 7, 1709.

Yesterday I shot a fox; the squire called me a good _garçon_ and made me
a present of an inlaid powder horn. Jens's instruction has borne fruit.
This shooting is quite good fun.--I am getting along better with the
French; I am catching on to the pronunciation. One day I listened at the
door when the French governess was giving the young ladies their lesson.
When they were through and had gone upstairs, I contrived to look at the
book to find out which one they were using. Good gracious! How surprised
I was! It was one that I too have, one called _L'École du Monde._ So now
I stand outside the door every day with my book in my hand, listening to
them. It works very well. After all, the French language is much
prettier than I realized; it sounds lovely when Miss Sophie speaks it.

THIELE, December 13, 1709.

Yesterday God saved my gracious master's life by my poor hand. We had a
battue in Lindum woods. Just as we were opposite Graakjaer, a wild boar
rushed out and made straight for the squire. He fired, and hit it all
right, but did not kill it, and the boar went for him. The squire was
not frightened; he drew his hanger and was about to plunge it in the
breast of the boar when it broke in two. Now, what was to be done? It
all happened so quickly that no one could reach him. I ran toward him,
but in the same moment I saw the squire on the back of the boar, and off
it dashed with him. "Fire!" he cried to the bailiff, who had been
standing next to him on the left--but the bailiff didn't dare to. "Fire,
in the devil's name," he called to Jens as he passed him. Jens's gun
missed fire. Then the boar turned and passed close to me. "Fire, Martin,
or the boar will ride to hell with me," he screamed. In the name of God,
I thought, and aimed for the animal's hindquarters, and was lucky enough
to crush both its thighs. Glad was I, and happy were we all, the squire
especially. "That was a master shot," he said. "And now you keep the
gun, since you can use it so well. And listen," he said to the bailiff,
"you mollycoddle! Mark me the biggest beech in the forest for his
mother. Jens can go home and fix his gun." Then, when we came home in
the evening, there was a questioning and narrating. The squire patted me
on the shoulder, and Miss Sophie smiled on me so kindly that my heart
was in my throat.

THIELE, January n, 1710.

A _plaisant_ weather! The sun rises red as a burning coal. It looks so
_curieux_ as it shines through the white trees, and all the trees look
as if they had been powdered, and the branches hang around them down to
the ground. The old Grand Richard is badly battered; a couple of its
limbs are broken already. It was just such a day a week ago when we
drove to Fussingöe, and I was standing on the runners of Miss Sophie's
sleigh. She wanted to handle the reins herself, but after about fifteen
minutes her small fingers began to feel cold. _"J'ai froid,"_ she said
to herself. "Do you want me to drive, Miss?" I asked.--_"Comment!"_ she
said. "Do you understand French?"--_"Un feu, mademoiselle,"_ I replied.
She turned round and looked me full in the face. I took one of the reins
in either hand, and thus had both my arms round her. I tried to hold
them far apart in order not to come too near her, but whenever the
sleigh gave a jolt and threw her against me, it seemed as if I had
touched a hot stove. I felt as if I were flying through space with her,
and we were at Fussingöe before I knew it. If she had not called out,
_"Tenez, Martin! arretez-vous!"_ I should have driven on to Randers or
to the world's end. I wonder if she isn't going out driving today! But
there is Jens with the squire's gun, which he has cleaned--so I suppose
we are going out hunting again.

THIELE, February 13, 1710.

I don't feel well. It is as if a heavy stone were weighing on my chest.
I can't keep my food down, and at night I can't sleep. Last night I had
a strange dream. It seemed to me that I was standing on the runners of
Miss Sophie's sleigh, and then suddenly I was sitting in the sleigh and
had her on my lap. My right arm was around her waist, and her left
around my neck. She bent down and kissed me, but in the same moment I
awakened. Oh, I wanted so much to go on dreaming!--It is a fine book she
lent me. I amuse myself reading it every night. Oh, if one could be as
happy as the Tartarean prince! The more French I read the better I like
it; I am almost forgetting my Latin on account of it.

THIELE, March 13, 1710.

Yesterday, as we were coming home from hunting snipes, the squire said
to me, "And I hear that you understand French?"--"A little, sir," I
replied.--"But then you can't wait on table; we couldn't open our mouths
with you there."--"Oh, sir," I cried, "you don't mean to send me
away?"--_"Point de tout"_ he replied. "From now on you shall be my
_valet de chambre._ And when Master Kresten goes to Paris, you shall go
with him. What do you say to that?" I was so moved that I couldn't say a
word, but kissed his hand. But although I look forward to going, I dread
the thought of leaving, and I really think my health has worsened since
then.

THIELE, May 1, 1710.

Wretched creature that I am! Now I know what is the matter with me.
Ovidius has described my distemper exactly. If I am not mistaken, it is
called _Amor,_ which means "love" or "infatuation," and the person I am
enamored of must without a doubt be Miss Sophie. Miserable fool that I
am! What will this lead to? I must try his _Remedia amoris._ A few
minutes ago I saw her standing in the hall and talking to Jens. It cut
me to the heart as with a knife. I could have shot him through the head,
but then she skipped past me with a smile--I felt as when I am out
hunting and the quarry comes within range of my gun; my heart pounds
against my ribs, and I can hardly get my breath, and my eyes are as if
they were glued to the animal--_ah, malheureux que je suis!_

THIELE, June 17, 1710.

How empty and tiresome the house seems. The family are away and won't be
back for a week. How shall I get through it? I don't want to do
anything. My gun hangs there dirty and rusty, and I don't care to bother
about cleaning it. How can Jens and the rest of them be so gay and
happy! They're jabbering and roaring with laughter till the yard gives
echo--while I sigh like a bittern. Oh, Miss Sophie, if only you were a
peasant girl or I a prince!

THIELE, June 28, 1710.

Now the house looks to me as if it had been newly whitewashed and
embellished. The trees in the garden have taken on a lovely light green
color, and everybody looks kind. Miss Sophie has come home. She came in
through the gate like the sun piercing a cloud; but nevertheless I
trembled like a leaf. It's both good and bad to be in love.

THIELE, October 4, 1710.

We had a magnificent hunt today. Three hundred beaters were posted in
Hvidding copse, for they had come from Viskum and Fussingöe with all
their hounds. We of Thiele were on the spot at dawn. There was no wind,
and a thick layer of fog covered the land; only the beacon hills could
be seen above it. Within the fog we could hear the heavy footsteps of
the beaters and occasionally the baying of a hound. "There they are
coming from Viskum," said the squire; "I know Chasseur's bark."--"And
now they are coming from Fussingöe, too," said Jens. "That's Perdrix
baying." Still we couldn't see anything on account of the fog, but as
they came nearer we heard the rumbling of the carts, the breathing of
the horses, the talk and laughter of the gamekeepers. The huntsmen were
already putting the beaters in their positions; we could hear them
whispering and hushing those who were inclined to talk too loud, and
sometimes using their sticks. From the west and the south the
gamekeepers came driving in, and behind them came the carts with the
hounds, their tails wagging over the side of the carts and sometimes a
head protruding--only to get a box on the ear from the huntsmen's boys.
Now the squire himself posted us all down the long valley that runs
through the copse. When he was ready, he blew his whistle, and the
hornblowers started to play a merry piece. The hounds were loosed, and
it was not long before they began baying, first one, then two, then the
whole pack. Hares, foxes, and deer darted back and forth in the
brushwood on the hills. Now and then a shot rang out, echoing down
through the valley. We could not see the beaters, but we heard them
shouting and calling when a hare or a deer tried to break through. I
held my place and shot two foxes and a buck before lunch. While we were
eating, the hounds were called in and tied up, but the hornblowers
played. When it was over, off we went again. Just then two carriages
stopped at the entrance to the valley with the ladies, among them Miss
Sophie. That saved a fox, for while I was looking up at them, he slipped
past me. Before nightfall the copse was cleared of game. We must have
shot about thirty animals, and Master Kresten, who had killed the most
foxes, was honored by a piece played on the bugle.

THIELE, December 17, 1710.

Yesterday I followed my dear mother to her last resting-place. The new
pastor--God reward him for it!--honored her passing with a funeral
sermon that lasted an hour and three quarters. She was a good and loving
mother to me. God give her a blessed awakening!

THIELE, January 23, 1711.

What a miserable winter! No sleighing yet! I have been longing for it
ever since Martinmas, but in vain. Rain and wind, southerly gales, and
dreary weather. Last year at this time we drove to Fussingöe. When I
think of that night! The moon shone as bright as a silver platter on the
blue sky, throwing our shadows to the side of the road on the white
snow. Sometimes I leaned over till my shadow mingled with that of Miss
Sophie; then it seemed to me that we two were one. A cold wind blew in
our faces and carried her sweet breath back to me; I drank it in like
wine. Oh, fool that I am!--lovesick fool that I am!  What good do such
thoughts do me? Sunday I am going to Copenhagen with Master Kresten, and
there we are going to stay all summer. I dare say I shall be dead before
Mayday.--_Ah, mademoiselle Sophie, adieu! un éternel adieu!_

AT SEA BETWEEN SAMSÖE AND ZEALAND, February 3, 1711.

The sun is setting behind my dear Jutland; the reflection lies over the
calm sea like an endless path of fire. It seems to bring a greeting from
my home. Alas! it is far away, and I am getting farther and farther away
from it. I wonder what they are doing now at Thiele! My right ear is
burning--perhaps it is Miss Sophie who is talking about me? Alas, no! I
am only a poor servant; why should she think of me?--any more than the
skipper who is walking up and down on the deck with arms crossed. Every
little while he looks toward the north; I wonder what he sees there? "A
Swede," he says. God help us in His mercy and goodness!

KALLUNDBORG, February 4, 1711.

Now I know what war is. I have been in battle, and--the Lord of Sabaoth
be praised!--victory was ours. It was, as the skipper said, a Swedish
privateer. Early this morning, as soon as it was light, we saw him only
two miles away from us; they said he was chasing us. "Are there any of
you passengers," said the skipper, "who have courage and stout hearts
and would like to try a bout with that Swedish fellow?"--"I have a good
rifle," replied Master Kresten, "and my servant has one. What of it,
Morten, shall we try this kind of hunt for once?"--"As you please,
Master Kresten," I said, ran down into the cabin, loaded our rifles, and
brought them up on deck together with powder and shot. There were two
soldiers from Jutland who came up from the hold, and they had each a
blunderbuss, and the skipper had a Spanish gun as long as himself. The
mate and the sailors armed themselves with axes and marlinspikes. "Can't
we sail away from him, my good skipper?" I asked.--"The devil we can,"
he replied. "Don't you see he's gaining on us for all he's worth? We
shall soon be hearing his cannon. But if you're scared, you can go home
and crawl into your mother's bureau drawer." In the same moment the
smoke poured from the Swedish ship, and then we heard a terrific noise
and a whizzing over our heads. Before long there was another explosion,
and then another, and the last cannon ball tore a splinter from our
mast. Then a strange feeling came over me; my heart pounded, and there
was a ringing and a buzzing in my ears. But when the Swede came so near
that we could reach him with our rifles, and I had taken my first shot,
then I felt as if I were out hunting. The Swede came nearer and nearer.
We stood in the shelter of the cabin and fired at him across our stern
as fast as we could. Several of his people fell, most of them hit by the
young master or me. "If we can shoot a snipe, Morten, surely we can hit
a Swede, when he stands still," he said.--"Brave fellows!" said the
skipper. "Do you see the Swedish captain, the man with the big sabre,
who's walking up and down? If you can pick him off, we've won the game!"
I aimed at him, pressed the trigger, and as I took my rifle from my
cheek, I saw him fall and strike the deck with his nose. "Hurrah!" cried
the skipper, and we all cheered.  But the privateer turned round and
sailed away. With the Danish flag flying aloft we sailed into
Kallundborg Fjord, proud and happy, for not a man had been wounded,
although the cannon balls flew over and through the ship. The tutor,
Monsieur Hartman, was the only one who saw his own blood, and that
happened in a curious way. He was lying in the skipper's bunk smoking
his pipe when the battle commenced. A little later I came down to fetch
tow for the bullets. _"Martin,"_ said he, _'quid hoc sibi vult?"_ But
before I could answer, a bullet flew through the cabin window and shot
away his pipe which he was holding out over the edge of the bunk--and
the mouthpiece pierced his palate.

Now we are in port and on dry land, where rest is sweet after such a
bout.

COPENHAGEN, June 2, 1711.

My head is full of all the strange things I have seen. I can't dispose
them in my mind, for one chases the other like clouds in a wind. But the
most curious thing is that I have almost gotten over my lovesickness.
The longer I stay here, the less it seems to me I long for Miss Sophie,
and I am almost ready to believe there are just as beautiful maidens in
Copenhagen. If I were to write a footnote to _Ovidii Remedium amoris,_ I
would recommend a trip to the Capital as one of the best cures for that
dangerous malady.

ANCHORED UNDER KRONBORG, September 12, 1711.

Oh, gracious Heaven! What have I not lived through! What wretchedness
and misery have I not seen with these my eyes! God has visited our sins
upon us and stricken the people with boils. They died like flies round
about me, but I, unworthy that I am, was saved from the jaws of death.
Oh, my dear young master!  What