Spinning-songs depart;
Songs which youth sings soon become
Music of the heart.

Here it was that I heard for the first time the word _poet_
spoken, and that with so much reverence, as proved it to be something
sacred. It is true that my father had read Holberg's play to me; but
here it was not of these that they spoke, but of verses and poetry. "My
brother the poet," said Bunkeflod's sister, and her eyes sparkled as
she said it. From her I learned that it was a something glorious, a
something fortunate, to be a poet. Here, too, for the first time, I
read Shakspeare, in a bad translation, to be sure; but the bold
descriptions, the heroic incidents, witches, and ghosts were exactly to
my taste. I immediately acted Shakspeare's plays on my little puppet
theatre. I saw Hamlet's ghost, and lived upon the heath with Lear. The
more persons died in a play, the more interesting I thought it. At this
time I wrote my first piece: it was nothing less than a tragedy,
wherein, as a matter of course, everybody died. The subject of it I
borrowed from an old song about Pyramus and Thisbe; but I had increased
the incidents through a hermit and his son, who both loved Thisbe, and
who both killed themselves when she died. Many speeches of the hermit
were passages from the Bible, taken out of the little catechism,
especially from our duty to our neighbors. To the piece I gave the
title "Abor and Elvira."

"It ought to be called 'Perch (Aborre) and Stockfish,'" said one of our
neighbors wittily to me, as I came with it to her after having read it
with great satisfaction and joy to all the people in our street. This
entirely depressed me, because I felt that she was turning both me and
my poem to ridicule. With a troubled heart I told it to my mother.