been a stranger, the teacher, while instructing his pupil and giving him
practical guidance, constantly keeping in view all that could further
his well-being and assist his future; my attitude was one of reverence
and affection, and of profound gratitude for the care of which I was the
object.

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

To me, for instance, Ploug's _The Fatherland_ was at that time
Denmark's most intellectual organ, whereas Bille's _Daily Paper_
disgusted me, more particularly on account of the superficiality and the
tone of finality which distinguished its literary criticisms. Broechner,
who, with not unmixed benevolence, and without making any special
distinction between the two, looked down on both these papers of the
educated mediocrity, saw in his young pupil's bitterness against the
trivial but useful little daily, only an indication of the quality of
his mind. Broechner's mere manner, as he remarked one day with a smile,
"You do not read _The Daily Paper_ on principle," made me perceive