made him small. She and hers passed undefiled through places where he
stuck fast in the surface mire.

She seemed to him to grow in here, and led his thoughts behind the
surface, where they had never been before. Her unfailing mother-love was
like a beating pulse that rose from the invisible and revealed hidden
mystical forces--the perceptible rhythm of a great heart which beat in
concealment behind everything. Her care resembled that of God Himself;
she was nearer to the springs of life than he.

The springs of life! Through her the expression for the first time
acquired a meaning for him. It was on the whole as if she re-created
him, and by occupying himself with her ever enigmatical nature, his
thoughts were turned further and further inward. He suspected the
presence of strong currents which bore the whole thing; and sometimes in
the silence of his cell he seemed to hear his existence flowing, flowing
like a broad stream, and emptying itself out there where his thoughts
had never ventured to roam. What became of the days and the years with
all that they had held? The ever present Ellen, who had never herself
given a thought to the unseen, brought Pelle face to face with infinity.

While all this was going on within him, they sang one Sunday during the
prison service Grundtvig's hymn, "The former days have passed away." The
hymn expressed all that he had himself vaguely thought, and touched him
deeply; the verses came to him in his narrow pen like waves from a
mighty ocean, which rolled ages in to the shore in monotonous power. He
suddenly and strongly realized the passage of generations of human
beings over the earth, and boldly grasped what he had until now only
dimly suspected, namely, his own connection with them all, both those
who were living then and all those who had gone before. How small his