pleasure as Poul Moeller's Verses had done. And for a few years, grace
and charm, and the perfect control of language and poetic form, were in
my estimation the supreme thing until, on entering upon my eighteenth
year, a violent reaction took place, and resonance, power and grandeur
alone seemed to have value. From Hertz my sympathies went over to
Christian Winther, from Baggesen to Homer, Aeschylus, the Bible,
Shakespeare, Goethe. One of the first things I did as a student was to
read the Bible through in Danish and the Odyssey in Greek.


XXIV.

The years of approaching maturity were still distant, however, and my
inner life was personal, not real, so that an element of fermentation
was cast into my mind when a copy of Heine's _Buch der Lieder_ was
one day lent to me. What took my fancy in it was, firstly, the
combination of enthusiasm and wit, then its terse, pithy form, and after
that the parts describing how the poet and his lady love, unable to
overcome the shyness which binds their tongues, involuntarily play hide
and seek with one another and lose each other; for I felt that I should
be equally unable to find natural and simple expression for my feelings,
should things ever come to such a pass with me. Of Heine's personality,
of the poet's historic position, political tendencies or importance, I
knew nothing; in these love-poems I looked more especially for those
verses in which violent self-esteem and blase superiority to every
situation find expression, because this fell in with the Petsjorin note,
which, since reading Lermontof's novel, was the dominant one in my mind.
As was my habit in those years, when it was still out of the question
for me to buy books that pleased me, I copied out of the _Buch der
Lieder_ all that I liked best, that I might read it again.